tales of the hasidim: martin buber’s universal vision
TRANSCRIPT
TALES OF THE HASIDIM: MARTIN BUBER’S UNIVERSAL VISION
OF ECSTATIC JOY AND SPIRITUAL WHOLENESS
by
CHARLES DAVID HANNA
A THESIS
Presented to the Folklore Program
and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Master of Arts
March 2017
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THESIS APPROVAL PAGE
Student: Charles David Hanna
Title: Tales of the Hasidim: Martin Buber’s Universal Vision of Ecstatic Joy and Spiritual
Wholeness
This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the Master of Folklore degree in the Folklore Program by:
Dr. Dorothee Ostmeier Chairperson
Dr. Carol Silverman Member
Scott L. Pratt Dean of the Graduate School
Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School.
Degree awarded March 2017
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© 2017 Charles David Hanna
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THESIS ABSTRACT
Charles David Hanna
Master of Arts
Folklore Program
March 2017
Title: Tales of the Hasidim: Martin Buber’s Universal Vision of Ecstatic Joy and Spiritual
Wholeness
I will examine Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim, and the limits of his concepts
of “ecstatic joy” and “spiritual wholeness.” To Buber, Hasidic legends present the
possibility of overcoming tensions between the quotidian present and the messianic
future, divisions of sacred and profane, divine and self. I argue that Buber does not
present clear instructions on how to achieve this unity, so I turn to his other writings on
Hasidism in order to trace his definition of “ecstatic joy” and “spiritual wholeness.”
While Buber accurately depicts the Zaddik-Hasidim relationship, he downplays the
importance of Jewish Law (Halacha) in facilitating the goal of ecstatic joy and spiritual
wholeness which he posits as the essence of Hasidism. Ultimately, I conclude that while
Buber ignores “authentic” aspects of Hasidic life, he indeed uses the Hasidic tale to
effectively present a message of ecstatic joy and spiritual wholeness to a universal
audience.
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CURRICULUM VITAE
NAME OF AUTHOR: Charles David Hanna
GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED:
University of Oregon, Eugene
University of Miami, Coral Gables
DEGREES AWARDED:
Master of Arts, Folklore, 2017, University of Oregon
Bachelor of Arts, English, 2009, University of Miami
AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST:
Folklore
Fairy Tales
Hasidic Legends
Mythology
Judaic Studies
Architecture
Architectural History
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
Credit Banker, Bank of America, January 2016 - Present
Client Liaison, First Freedom Preservation, October 2015 – January 2016
Middle School Language Arts Teacher, Torah Academy, 2013 - 2015
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to express appreciation to Dr. Dorothee Ostmeier, who introduced me to
the work of Martin Buber and originated the idea for a project on his Tales of the
Hasidim. She graciously agreed to see it through to completion after a four-year hiatus,
and provided insightful commentary and suggestions throughout the writing process. I
would also like to express appreciation to Dr. Carol Silverman, who agreed to be on the
committee for this project; her class on Jewish folklore was a source of inspiration that
set me on the path toward the study of Hasidism. Dr. Daniel Wojcik and Beth Magee of
the Folklore department also deserve appreciation, for they went above and beyond to
facilitate the completion of this long-distance project through various forms and petitions.
Another thank you is merited by everyone who encouraged me to return to school and
finish my degree, among them the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who encouraged his Hasidim to
finish something they start. I would be remiss if I did not thank Martin Buber himself, for
compiling the Hasidic legends into his anthology, and writing extensively and
thoughtfully on the subject of Hasidism. Lastly and most importantly, my wife deserves
my thanks; she supported this project from start to finish, and sacrificed many hours of
family time so that I could work on my thesis. My success in life is due to her love and
encouragement.
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To my wife, Rachel.
“Live life with the life you love” (Kohelet 9:9)
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1
II. BUBER’S INTRODUCTION TO TALES OF THE HASIDM:
TRANSLATING HASIDISM AND ITS TERMINOLOGY ................................. 5
III. BUBER’S RETROSPECTIVES: HASIDISM AS HEALING
FOR THE CRISIS OF MODERN MAN ............................................................... 23
IV. HASIDISM TODAY: BUBER’S FORGOTTEN DEMOGRAPHIC,
STORYTELLING CONTEXTS, AND THE REBBE .......................................... 44
V. LAW AND STORYTELLING IN HASIDISM ..................................................... 67
VI. FINDING THE HASIDIC MESSAGE BY
REFRAMING OUR PERSPECTIVE.................................................................... 81
VII. OUR WAY TO HASIDISM
AND HASIDIC STORYTELLING TODAY ....................................................... 114
VIII. CONCLUSION ................................................................................................... 138
REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 143
1
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
In this essay I will examine Martin Buber’s collection of Hasidic stories, Tales of the
Hasidim (first published in 1947). Martin Buber (1878 – 1965) was a German Jewish
theologian best known for his philosophy of the “I-Thou” dialogue, but he also compiled
several anthologies of Hasidic legends and wrote extensively on Hasidism. I will examine
the limits of Buber’s concepts of “ecstatic joy,” “spiritual wholeness,” and their universal
applicability, which he discusses in his introduction to the anthology. Buber writes that
the Hasidic legend presents the possibility of overcoming the tensions between the
quotidian present and the messianic future, divisions of sacred and profane, and the
divine and the self. I argue that Buber does not present clear instructions about how to
achieve these goals, so I turn to his other writings on Hasidism in order to trace his
definition of “ecstatic joy” and “spiritual wholeness” with all their subcategories. I am led
to believe that while Buber accurately depicts the relationship between zaddik and hasid,
he downplays the importance of Jewish Law (Halacha) in facilitating the goal of ecstatic
joy and spiritual wholeness which he posits as the essence of Hasidism. To fortify my
questions, I present ethnographic research, examine several essays that take a critical look
at the authenticity of Buber’s depiction of Hasidism, and conclude with a discussion of
personal experience. Ultimately, I come to the conclusion that while Buber may
downplay “authentic” aspects of Hasidic life (for example, religious observance as
dictated by Halacha) he does indeed use the Hasidic tale to effectively present a message
of ecstatic joy and spiritual wholeness to a universal audience.
2
Buber’s depiction of Hasidism was criticized by Gershom Scholem and others1 as
inaccurate and romanticized. As a practicing Hasidic Jew, I too had reservations about
Buber’s anthology, because I had experienced Hasidic storytelling in my own life and
seen how it fit into the greater framework of Hasidism. Actually, “inauthentic” and
“romanticized” are not terms I would used to describe Buber’s work; I was not bothered
by Buber’s decision to remain a secular Jew despite his immersion in Hasidic texts, and I
did not disagree with his depiction of Hasidic philosophy and the Hasidic masters—in
fact, I believe he clearly communicated many of the main tenets of the Hasidic
movement. I took issue with the fact that Buber’s definition of Hasidism seemed to be
missing the key element of strict religious observance. Buber wrote about the feeling of
“ecstatic joy” which was the goal of Hasidism, and the role of the zaddik figure as a
facilitator of “spiritual wholeness,” but despite the beauty and poetry of his introduction
to the Tales of the Hasidim, there were no suggestions about how the reader could
implement this reality into their own life.
For clarity on how Buber’s legendary Hasidic reality could become tangible, I
looked beyond his introduction and turned to his writings on Hasidism, especially those
found in Hasidism (1946) and Hasidism and Modern Man (1958). I did not find the full
elaboration I was seeking on how Hasidic storytelling and life interfaced, so to develop a
clearer picture of real-life Hasidism, I turned toward ethnographic research on Hasidism
by Jerome Mintz in Legends of the Hasidim (1968) and Ayala Fader in Mitzvah Girls
(2009). I will also compare Buber’s description of the zaddik figure to that of Gedalyah
Nigal’s assessment in The Hasidic Tale (2002), where she analyzes the history of the
1 Such as Steven Katz and Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer; see Ran HaCohen’s article "The Hay Wagon Moves to the West: on Martin Ruber's Adaptation of Hassidic Legends” (1).
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Hasidic tale in depth, from its oral origins to its printed anthologizing. As a practicing
Hasidic Jew, I believe that a major component of Hasidism is the strict observance of
Jewish Law (halacha), which Buber does not discuss beyond some passing references.
To supplement my view in this matter, I will take articles by Hayyim Nahman Bialik
(“Halachah and Aggadah,” reprinted in 2000) and Robert Covers (“Nomos and
Narrative,” 1998) which describe the weaving together of narrative and legal discussion
in Jewish texts. In these segments, I will note where fieldwork, ethnographies, and
scholarly research confirm Buber’s definition of Hasidism, and where they differ.
I will then turn to several articles that discuss whether or not Buber’s storytelling
remains true to the ideas of Hasidic philosophy (for example, elevation of the mundane
into the spiritual) by examining criticism of Buber’s work in several essays: “The
Haywagon Moves West: on Martin Buber’s Adaptation of Hasidic Legends,” by Ran
HaCohen (2008), “On Myth, History, the Study of Hasidism: Martin Buber and Gershom
Scholem,” by Claire Sufrin (2012), and “But I Will Tell of their Deeds: Retelling a
Hasidic Tale about the Power of Storytelling,” by Levi Cooper (2014). Using these
articles, I will seek to reframe the critical expectation of Buber to authentically portray
Hasidic life in his storytelling, and illustrate that despite the perceived inaccuracies (be
they linguistic, historical, or theological) in Buber’s re-crafting of Hasidic lore, he
remains true to the Hasidic ideal of elevating the mundane into the spiritual, a process
with potentially universal applicability that is not necessarily confined to the Hasidic
world of strict religious observance, which I had personally demanded of Buber.
Moreover, by moving his focus away from religious observance, Martin Buber takes the
Hasidic legend, and through Tales of the Hasidism, transforms it into a universal vision of
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ecstatic joy and spiritual wholeness which is accessible for all people. I will then turn to a
summary of Martin Buber’s journey to Hasidism, and some accounts of Hasidic
storytelling I experienced firsthand, along with an interview with a Hasidic Rabbi who
regularly features a Hasidic story in his weekly Shabbos drasha [Sabbath sermon], in
order to examine the limits of Buber’s universal vision of ecstatic joy and spiritual
wholeness.
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CHAPTER II
BUBER’S INTRODUCTION TO TALES OF THE HASIDIM:
TRANSLATING HASIDISM AND ITS TERMINOLOGY
Martin Buber grew up on the estate of his grandfather, Solomon Buber, who was
renowned translator of Midrashic literature. Buber was home-schooled, bookish,
imaginative, and absorbed many languages. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
tells us that already at a young age, his “literary voice may be best understood as
probingly personal while seeking communication with others, forging a path between
East and West, Judaism and Humanism, national particularity and universal spirit”
(Braiterman and Zank). Entering the urban sphere of Vienna, Buber was exposed to a
climate where “radical new approaches to psychology and philosophy were being
developed” and “the burning social and political issues” of the era were discussed in
terms of solutions like socialism, fascism, existentialism, and psychoanalysis (ibid.). The
various intellectual currents of the age were creative fuel for Buber, whose writing
covered areas as diverse as Zionism and Hasidism. His seminal philosophical work I and
Thou focuses on the mutual experience of “encounter” that occurs in the connected space
between parties of an interpersonal relationship, a theme that would be featured
prominently in his anthology of Hasidic legends, with its focus on the Zaddik-Hasid
relationship.
Buber lived through a dynamic time; in his life he saw two world wars, the
Holocaust, the onset of Modernism, and the foundation of the State of Israel. The greater
context of Buber’s life, and his connection with a diverse range of literary, philosophical,
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and political personages facilitated his blending philosophy, politics, literature, and
religious studies. While I will not dwell on a discussion of the greater context of Martin
Buber’s philosophical work, I touch upon the milieu of Modernism in which he lived and
worked in order to illustrate that for Buber, the “hybridity” of his writing meant that the
Hasidic legend was not a genre locked into a particular place or people (namely, the
Eastern European movement of Hasdism) but rather, it could be connected to the wider
world. For Buber, Hasidism posed a spiritual solution not just for the Jews (searching for
their place culturally and geographically in the 20th
century), but for all humankind.
Chaim Potok, author of many Jewish-themed novels (most popular among them
The Chosen) questions Buber’s portrayal of Hasidism in the foreword to the 1991 edition
of Tales of the Hasidism. Potok suggests that Buber’s interest in Hasidism may have
developed during the years he spent with his grandfather, who prayed in a Hasidic
synagogue.2 Childhood memories of religious Judaism fused with a renewed interest in
mysticism among European scholarly elite and Buber’s own existential questions to form
an interest in exploring Hasidism. The general milieu of Buber’s time was one in which
Zionism, the Haskalah, and Orthodoxy competed for the heart of European Jewry. Many
Jews left the fold of traditional Judaism completely, while others left behind the halacha
(Jewish Law), and sought to integrate other components of Judaism into a more
westernized, modern lifestyle. For many years, Buber himself was unsure of his Judaism
and lived “in a world of confusion” (Potok, viii). The searching nature of his personal
journey, which in large part involved a textual exploration of Hasidim, reflects a general
2 Buber himself provides us with further details of his early exposure to Hasidim in his essay “My Way to Hasidism.”
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necessity of the modern, twentieth-century European Jew to address their place in the
world and in history, poised between Judaism and secular life, between past and present.
In the twenty-sixth year of his life, Buber opened a biography of Rabbi Israel ben
Eliezer (the Baal Shem Tov) entitled Zevaat Ribesh, and the following words flashed out
at him: “He takes onto himself the quality of fervor…he is hallowed…and worthy to
create and is become like the Holy One, blessed be He” (Potok, viii). At this moment,
Buber experienced a spark of inspiration: the realization of the “Hasidic soul.” Buber
withdrew from the Zionist activity with which he was previously involved, and turned to
gathering Hasidic legends. According to Potok we have no clear picture of the Baal Shem
Tov, only the fragments of legends, and these legends are what Buber pieced together in
order to understand the Hasidic way, culminating in his first books on Hasidism, The
Stories of Rabbi Nahman (1906) and The Legends of the Baal Shem (1908). These
anthologies are categorized by The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as part of
Buber’s early phase of writing, accompanying essays on religion, art, and dance, with a
“preoccupation with shape (Gestalt), movement, color, language, and gesture as the
means of a “realized” or “perfected” particular human existence that represents life
beyond the limits of spatio-temporal duration,” for the human body and its natural motion
were the fundamental building blocks of human experience (Braiterman and Zank). Here
we see that for Buber, lofty philosophical realities could be traced to tangible physicality,
a theme which would carry over into his writings on Hasidism as well. This unity
(whereby everything could be traced back to a simple source) transcends time, and would
become a fundamental core tenet of Buber’s Hasidism, where he dwells on the idea of
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rejecting the search for a messianic endpoint, and finding ecstatic joy and divine
connection in the present moment.
Potok sees the ruination of the Jewish community as affected through various
wars, pogroms, the elitist, abstruse learning of the Torah, and rigid ritual combined,
forming a nearly impossible barrier against connection to G-d for the average water
carrier, shoemaker, and wagon driver of European Jewry. If learning was the only way to
find G-dliness, how could the common, ignorant Jew break free from the suffering of
exile? The Baal Shem Tov provided a solution: learning is not the only way; connection
to G-d is also possible to connect through fervor, exaltation, prayer, and joy. Potok writes
that this democratic strain was seized upon by Buber not only as the essence of Hasidism,
but also as the soul-force of Judaism.
And yet, Potok reminds us, that Buber has also been criticized for his
“unhistorical and somewhat romanticized view of Hasidism,” for ignoring elements of
charlatanism, obscurantism, quarreling, superstition, and most severely, ignoring the
importance of Torah Law in Hasidism (Potok, xii). Buber himself admitted that he was
not interested in historical accuracy, and as we will see in our exploration of his essays on
the subject, was fairly open about finding a more universal message in the tales unbound
by time, place, and ritual. In elaboration of Buber’s poetic license, Potok gives us a
summary of Buber’s early struggles in translating the tales of Rabbi Nachman, and how
Buber dealt with his difficulties in translation by a self-described process of fusing his
spirit with Rabbi Nachman himself, in order to complete the tales and render them more
faithful to their original meaning. Buber repeated this process to write The Legends of the
Baal Shem, but by the time he had arrived at Tales of the Hasidism, his methodology was
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admittedly too free, and he attempted to relate the legends in a less embellished way, only
closing the gaps in the fragmented material.
The issue of translation needed to be addressed by those who conveyed Jewish
texts outside of the Hebrew language such as Buber and his Jewish-German
contemporaries, among them Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, and Franz
Rosenzweig. For clarification on this topic, I will turn to Claire Sauter’s article, “Hebrew,
Jewishness, and Love: Translation in Gershom Scholem’s Early Work” (2015), which
examines Scholem and Benjamin’s differing views on the translation of Jewish concepts
(initially expressed in Hebrew) into a different language (namely, German). Sauter writes
that Gershom Scholem took issue with a translation by his contemporary, Dr. Alexander
Eliasberg, of three works, among them Sagen polnischer Juden (Tales of Polish Jews)
from Yiddish into German.3 For Scholem, Yiddish was already a translation of Hebrew,
and so a translation into German from Yiddish was essentially a translation of a
translation, distilling the subject matter of “Jewishness” beyond the clarity it had
achieved in the original Hebrew. Moreover, because Yiddish had already absorbed
Hebrew terminology without translation, Scholem was infuriated with Eliasberg’s
translation of Hebrew terms such as Torah into Gelehrsamkeit and zaddik into
Wunderrabbi. Sauter writes that for Scholem, “religious Jewish terms are not translatable
into any language other than Hebrew” and the words used to express the translated
concept are drawn from an inferior sphere, because Hebrew and “Jewishness” are
inseparable (164). Sauter believes that for Eliasberg, the concept (such as Torah or
zaddik) must be “transposed into another language without adding explanations” while
3 Eliasberg also translated Jüdische Geschichten (Jewish Stories) and Ostjüdische Erzähler (Jewish
Storytellers from Eastern Europe) by J.L. Perez (1916)
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for Scholem, the Jewishness must be preserved through use of the original word (166).
Sauter pithily summarizes the translation debate with one question: what should be given
more priority, the source or the target language?
Sauter also cites Benjamin’s theory of translation, proposing that through a meta-
language of love and respect, translation unites the source language and the target
language into a mode of communication that transcends linguistic boundaries. She
summarizes Benjamin’s view as follows: the translated word must leave its own mother
language and “live fully in the other language” (170). In Sauter’s reading of Benjamin,
translation is about creating one meta-language of love and reverence for the concept, by
respecting the original word, and making the concept accessible after its transposition.
Benjamin critiqued Scholem’s translation of the biblical poem attributed to King
Solomon, The Song of Songs, from Hebrew into German, for Benjamin perceived that
Scholem favored the Hebrew over the German, whereas the task of the translator requires
him to have love, reverence, and respect for both languages. In Sauter’s reading,
Benjamin is interested in the issue of language to express concepts through the powerful
tool of translation, while Scholem is more interested in the communication of Jewish
concepts—and therefore he favors retaining the terminology in the original Hebrew,
believing it to lose clarity and meaning in translation.
Franz Rosenzweig was another Jewish-German intellectual who grappled with the
issues of translation. In her article “Franz Rosenzweig on Translation and Exile,” Leora
Batnitzky analyzes the connection of language and national Jewish identity for
Rosenzweig, who worked with Buber to translate the Hebrew Bible into German. “The
task of the translation for Rosenzweig is to move the reader towards the author”
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(Batnitzky, 134). The degree to which the recipient understands the translated word
determines the success of translation; therefore, it is not only acceptable, but preferential
to translate words from the original Hebrew into German, in order to allow the reader
understanding of the concept. For Rosenzweig, the twentieth-century Jew was doubly
exiled: exiled not only in the Diaspora, but also from Judaism itself. In commenting on
his translation of the Grace-After-Meals prayer, he writes “we cannot avoid this detour
that again and again leads us the hard way from what is alien back to our own”
(Batnitzky, 135). Ironically then, translation helps the reader arrive back to an
understanding of the Jewish concept they have lost touch with, for the modern Jew exists
in “an inescapable state of translation” (ibid.). However, Rosenzweig is unequivocally
clear that the destination of this linguistic detour must be a return to Hebrew.
Rosenzweig, unlike Buber, is not interested in establishing a Jewish community through
Zionism, but rather through Hebrew language that solidifies the Jewish community
regardless of whatever host country they live in, for the natural state of a Jew is one of
wandering, and his identity is stronger when he yearns for the homeland than when he is
actually in it (ibid., 138). Here he certainly differs from Buber, who was openly Zionist,
and emigrated to Israel, where he lived until his death in 1965.
Although he lived out the last years of his life in Israel, Buber’s Zionism was not
purely geo-political, but rather “a conception of Jewish identity being neither a religious
nor a national form, but a unique hybrid” (Braiterman and Zank). While the creation of a
“Jewish homeland” and revitalization of Hebrew into a modern language could facilitate
the expression of Jewish identity, these changes alone would not lead to a full Jewish
renaissance: cultural rebirth was needed as well. To this end, Buber immersed himself in
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Jewish texts, one genre of which was the Hasidic legend, which he saw as an expression
of the fundamental tenets which had always been part of Judaism, namely, the
aforementioned spiritual wholeness and ecstatic joy of the messianic present.
In the following paragraphs we will consider how Martin Buber introduces his
anthology of Hasidic Folklore, Tales of the Hasidim, by working through his introduction
to the text. The terms zaddik, hasid, and Hasidism will be defined and discussed from
Buber’s point of view, based on his writing. He introduces his work by explaining that
“the purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to a world of legendary reality” (1).
He views the tales as comprising a legendary reality because they recollect what the
Hasidim experienced (or thought they had experienced), and they are not necessarily
“authentic in the sense that a chronicle is authentic” (ibid.). Buber writes that the legends
of the Hasidim depict a life perceived through the lens of religious fervor, described by
men who found themselves touched by something sublime; they expressed a feeling of
connection to the divine by communicating the effects of such a spiritual awakening upon
their daily lives.
The main subject of these tales are the Hasidic masters, who Buber refers to as
zaddikim.4 In his introduction to the Tales of the Hasidim, Buber tells us that the word
“zaddik” is usually translated as “the righteous,” but that it “actually means those who
stood the test” or “the proven” (ibid.). While Buber’s second interpretation of “zaddik” is
poetic, his embellishment beyond the simple translation indicates that he may take license
in the definition of his terms in order to define the legendary reality. For example, Buber
next translates Hasidim (the followers of the zaddik) as “the devout,” or “more
4 In this paper the Hebrew term צדיק [zaddik] will be spelled with some variety, such as tsadiq or tzadik, since it is transliterated differently by each writer
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accurately, those who keep faith with the covenant” (2). By using the phrase “more
accurately,” and “which actually means,” Buber has indicated (as he states openly in his
1946 preface to the Tales) that a mere literal translation was not sufficient to
communicate the essence of the tales; Buber would have to supply the “missing links” in
the translation through poetic embellishment. If Buber had wished, for instance, to
provide a definition of Hasid more grounded in classical Jewish texts, he could have
turned to the definition of Hasid which is first outlined in the Talmud (500 CE), as
someone who goes above and beyond the letter the law, illustrated by the example of one
who burns nail clippings instead of merely discarding them.5 However, Buber’s main
goal in the introduction is not to provide us with the dictionary definitions and
etymologies of his terminology, but rather to introduce us to the two main characters of
the tales, the zaddik and his hasidism, who form the I-thou relationship that Buber
perceives as crucial to the Hasidic narrative.
Buber presents a compromise between the extremities of these viewpoints on
translation—on the one hand, Eliasberg’s predilection for total transposition from
Hebrew into a new language, and on the other, Scholem’s preference for maintaining the
original Hebrew. Buber leaves certain terms such as zaddik and hasidim un-translated,
but he elaborates on their meaning in his introduction, and extensively in his other
writings. Many other terms Buber chooses to carry out of the Hebrew realm and
transpose into German (and subsequently English, or any other languages into which the
Tales have been translated), with examples such as ba’al ha’bos into “house-father,”
mikveh into “bath of immersion,” and Succos into “The Festival of Tabernacles.” I would
5 In fact, the passage in Tractate Niddah (page 17A) also defines a Tzadik as one who buries the nail clippings.
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say that Buber, seeking to make the tales more accessible, generally leaned toward the
stance of Eliasberg in favor of transposition. Buber translates the terms zaddik and hasid
as well, but he does so not with an equivalent word or phrase in German, but rather with
an anthology of legends called Tales of the Hasidim. The very anthology itself is Buber’s
definition of zaddik and hasid, as he says openly in his introduction, that “this
book…purports to express and document the association between zaddikim and hasidim”
(Buber, 2).
While I understand Buber’s decision to transpose words out of the Hebrew into
German (and subsequently English) in order to increase their accessibility for a general
readership, his translation of these terms moved the tales out of the context of the
Hasidism I had come to experience in my own life. From my own observations, I would
say that Hasidic Jews use Hebrew and/or Yiddish nouns almost exclusively to
communicate tangible “Jewish” items (people, places, and things such as a schochet
[ritual slaughterer] shul [synagogue], siddur [prayer book]), a little less frequently for
concepts (for example, emunah [faith], and parnassah [livelihood]), and that the
remaining communication occurs in English—for example “please pass me that siddur, I
need to daven [pray] mincha [the afternoon service].” For Scholem, Yiddish is able to
communicate Jewish concepts because it preserved Hebrew vocabulary, however, I find
that my daily experience challenges the Hebrew purism of Scholem’s translational
theory, because many of the words used for religious concepts are actually in Yiddish.
The reason I do not translate certain words into English during my conversation with
fellow Hasidic (and/or Orthodox) Jews is because there is no need to do so—both parties
are privy to the definition and connotations. If I need to translate a word for someone, I
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will still use the original word and explain its meaning, because theologically (here I
agree with Scholem) that the concept is most clearly expressed in the original language.
Moreover, use of Hebrew/Yiddish terminology invites the listener into a deeper
understanding of the concept through the accompanying explanation, and also because
use of the English equivalent will sound “funny” or “off” in conversation.
I see Buber’s translation of Jewish concepts by their transposition out of the
Hebrew and into the various world’s languages as an inclusive gesture; despite the fact
that for an initiated reader such as a practicing Hasidic Jew, the terminology may become
“watered down” and divested of significance, for the general readership the proverbial
door is opened, allowing a glimpse into the Hasidic life that would otherwise be obscured
by foreign terms. Furthermore, while Buber does not directly transpose terms like zaddik
and hasid into German, as we have mentioned, one could argue that he defines these
words with Tales of the Hasidim, using the anthology itself as translation.
To return to our survey of Buber’s introduction to Tales of the Hasidim, we find
that after defining the zaddik, he then defines Hasidism, writing that “the core of Hasidic
teachings is the concept of a life of fervor, of exalted joy” (2). In the first six generations
of the movement, Buber sees that this life of fervor and joy was authentically lived by the
zaddikim and their hasidim. According to Buber, a relationship with the Eternal is the
main purpose of religious experience, but the mundane nature of earthly life precludes
this exalted possibility, so that man must often look to some afterlife or messianic-
utopian future for a fulfilling, pure relationship with the divine. However, even the
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possibility of participation in a messianic future6 could not endow the immediate here
and now with the utopian spark of life.
According to Buber, prior to Hasidism, the only time this joy and fervor could
break into the present-day life of despair in the prolonged exile was through the
“messianic movements” which appeared periodically. The messianic movement of
Shabbetai Tzvi, a charismatic self-proclaimed messiah who drew much of Mediterranean
Jewry to his cause, and then converted to Islam while imprisoned by the Turkish Sultan,
was a disaster that ended in “renegacy and despair” (Buber, 3). The faith of the masses
was sorely tested by Tzvi’s conversion to Islam, and in the wake of these disparaging
events, only a life of fervent joy could help a Jew survive such tests of faith. The
development of Hasidism created the possibility of finding the messianic future in the
present, without a need to hurry toward the “end of days.”
However, Hasidism did not totally remove the messianic, utopian end-goal from
Judaism, but it helped its followers experience “joy in the world as it is” (Buber, 3).
Unlike Shabbetai Tzvi, who threw off the yoke of the Torah commandments, Hasidism
did not cast aside the religious obligation of the Jew to follow the code of Jewish law, but
it infused every law with new joy. Sabbatianism, culminating in the wild ecstasies of
Jacob Frank7, encouraged its followers to treat the forbidden as holy. Hasidism, on the
other hand, did not embrace the forbidden, but encouraged its followers to find the sacred
in the mundane. It did not encourage the Hasid to deny his loves, desires, and personal
nature, but rather, to “seize them and bind them to G-d,” for finding the joy in every
6 Messianic redemption is an integral belief of Judaism according to the Thirteen Articles of [Jewish] Faith articulated by Maimonides (R. Moses ben Maimon, 1135 -1204 CE). See "Articles of Faith" in the Encyclopaedia Judaica (2007). 7 Born in 1726, died in 1791; Jacob Frank claimed to be a reincarnation of Shabbetai Tzvi
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moment is not enough; the ultimate goal must be finding the joy in connection with the
divine (Buber, 4). Buber then poses a question raised by his description of Hasidism: in
practicality, how is the common man to achieve this “life in fervent joy?” In order to
experience this joy, it is necessary to have a united soul directed toward a divine goal, but
how can this lofty status can be achieved in a world of peril, pressure, delusions, and
challenges? Man needs a zaddik to show him the way.
He needs a guide to lift his soul, and since his soul is intertwined with mundane
concerns, “the big and little cares,” he needs a guide who will compassionately address
the practical points of life: “a helper for both body and soul” (Buber, 5). This guide is the
zaddik who can heal the great rifts in life which cause man pain, and in the process of
healing, binds together man and G-d, body and soul; the zaddik is the unifier of worlds.
He does not do the spiritual “task” for his Hasidim, but rather, he shows them the way,
helping them in their time of need, but never relieving the of them of the work they must
do on their own, for “one man can take the place of another only as far as the threshold of
the inner sanctum” (Buber, 6). Buber emphasizes that this role of the zaddik as a
facilitator of man’s connection to the divine (without replacing the divine) is integral to
“true” Hasidism, and exemplified in the first few generations—what followed in the
succeeding generations was a distortion of the true essence of the movement.
The zaddik has a great influence on his hasidim, but, according to Buber, not so
much through his teachings as much as by his mere presence. Buber quotes a hasid as
saying: “I learned Torah from all the limbs of my teacher” (6). Under the tutelage of the
zaddik, eating, sleeping, and earning a living all become activities invested with holiness,
achieved by bodily proximity to his holy example. In order to facilitate this spiritual
18
elevation of the mundane lives of his followers, the zaddik must be close to his hasidim.
In fact, one of the fundamental principles of Hasidism (according to Buber) is the
connection between the hasid and the zaddik.
Just as much as the hasidim rely on the zaddik, the zaddik relies on his hasidim—
and here Buber cites a story of the hasidim dancing around their master, the Baal Shem
Tov, who had fallen into a state of depression because the clouds occluded the new moon
and prevented his recital of the New Moon Blessing. Surrounding the master with their
joy, they pulled him into the dance. The clouds broke, the moon appeared, and the Baal
Shem Tov was able to recite the blessing; in that moment the simple folk were able to
achieve with their joy what zaddik could not do with his kabbalistic devotions. This
example illustrates that union with the simple folk is not a descent on the spiritual ladder
for the zaddikim, but rather, a mutual ascent for both.
The zaddik and his hasidim form a “holy community,” with the zaddik as the
central point and spiritual guide for the hasidim that surround him. Buber cites Rabbi
Nahman of Bratslav, who said before his death that spiritual strength could flow from the
zaddik into all the simple men, and (according to Buber’s interpretation) not just the
simple men of Israel, but all mankind (Buber, 7). Here, in the opening comments of
introduction to Tales of the Hasidim, we see an inclination toward universality in Buber’s
writing, where he seeks to take the Hasidic tales and bring them into a larger, worldwide
context. To summarize, what Buber sees as the essence of Hasidism is the union between
the zaddik and the simple folk. “The teacher kindles the souls of his disciples, and they
surround him and light his life with the flame he has kindled” (Buber, 8). Together they
form a community, and the zaddik is at the center, unifying his close-knit circle of
19
disciples, who, under his tutelage, live lives of ecstatic joy in frequent union with G-d
even during the mundane moments of life.
Buber does not discuss any particular Hasidic context of storytelling thoroughly
(that is, when and where are these stories told), but he briefly references the third meal of
the Sabbath. The third meal is conducted as the Sabbath afternoon transitions into
evening, when the Sabbath draws to a close. At this meal, the zaddik expounds the Holy
Scriptures, revealing what is hidden, and directs his thoughts towards his followers, who
are like ripples around the dynamic energy of his words. In this ritual meal, we see how
the Hasidim are a united as “an elated whole, such as can only be formed around an
elated center” (Buber, 8). However, even beyond this ritual, in all areas the life, the
hasidim are bound together in brotherhood, drinking to one another’s health, telling each
other stories, dancing and singing together, and helping one another in times of need.
Buber concludes his general outline of Hasidism by stating that as the movement
went on, certain aspects became distorted, such as the fervent love for the zaddik
becoming a reverence for a great magician who relieves his hasidim of all spiritual work,
assumes the burden for them, and secures them a place in the afterlife. According to
Buber, the movement became punctuated with superstition, fraud, and fantasy, but Buber
excuses these foibles by saying such drawbacks are common to all populist religious
movements, and he also cites the “pathological premises of life in exile” that makes a
fulfilling and authentic religious life so difficult for the Jews (Buber 10). Buber believes
beyond the sixth generation, Hasidism fell into decay, but even so, he believes that a
“germ of the kingdom of G-d” still exists within the movement, and a spiritual radiance
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from the spiritual pioneers of early Hasidism still shines on the forehead of the Hasidic
Rebbes—the zaddikim—of Buber’s time (11).
Buber then turns to outline the historical-biographical course of first few
generations of Hasidism, starting with Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (c. 1700 – 1760), known
as the Baal Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name). According to Buber, Rabbi Israel was
a man who drew his life force from the union of heaven and earth, and the “life of such a
man is the constant receiving of fire and turning it into light,” the effect of which Buber
sees as twofold: returning to earth those who have risen too high up in lofty spiritual
heights, and raising to spiritual heights those who have fallen too far down in the earth
(11). In other words, the zaddik (specifically here the Baal Shem Tov) brings balance to
the universe and connects heaven and earth. Buber believes that Rabbi Israel is one such
rabbi in a long tradition of miracle workers called the Baalei Shem (Masters of the name),
but that the edition of Tov (good) to his name differentiates the Baal Shem Tov from his
magic-working predecessors, as one who is good, reliable, and in particular, close to the
people.
The Baal Shem Tov, according to Buber, won over initially antagonistic visitors
and turned them into devoted disciples by telling them stories “which stir the hearer just
because of their primitive character and apparent lack of intellectual quality, and finally
make him see and accept them as a reference to his own secret needs” (14). By healing
his visitors with stories and perhaps putting them in touch with their own inner sense of
self, the Baal Shem Tov illustrates the connection between nature and spirit and physical
and spiritual. This revelation of spiritual wholeness, brought to a world of men who have
forgotten the union between heaven and earth, “evokes ecstatic joy, for true ecstasy hails
21
neither from spirit nor from nature, but from the union of these two” (Buber, 14). Buber
then goes on to illustrate a general biography of the Baal Shem Tov’s successor, the
Maggid of Mezritch, and the generation after the Maggid, which divided into different
Hasidic branches. While I will not summarize his words about the Maggid, nor the
succeeding generations, I did choose to include a few of Buber’s words about the Baal
Shem Tov, because they help illustrate what the zaddik is to Buber: a connector. The
zaddik connects seemingly opposite components by revealing their hidden unity, such as
heaven and earth, or spirit and nature. Furthermore, Buber’s words on the Besht (an
acronym for the Baal Shem Tov) reiterate Buber’s central message about Hasidim: the
core of Hasidism is joy, and this joy is achieved through the spiritual wholeness of union,
such as that between man and G-d.
Buber’s introduction, while poetic and ambitious, still leaves some ambiguity
about the particulars regarding the theme of ecstatic joy, and Hasidism in general.
Despite the voluminous nature of his anthology (the two volumes amount to over 670
pages), one could argue that the stories are still missing the richness and experience of
Hasidic life itself, for the text of the printed page is missing the elements of music, food,
community, clothing, and atmosphere that the Hasidim experience along with the
storytelling. Furthermore, despite his embellished translations of zaddik and hasid,
Buber’s use of literal translations like “house-father,” “ritual bath,” or “festival of the
rejoicing of the law” 8
to describe the Hasidic life can leave an un-initiated reader
uninformed about the nature and importance of these terms. For example, the mikveh
(ritual bath) is constructed with specific dimensions to hold (at minimum) a specific
amount of water with kabbalistic implications. Hasidic men often immerse in the mikveh
8 Respectively “baal habos,” “mikveh,” and “Simchas Toireh,” to name a few examples.
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everyday to facilitate divine assistance in areas such as mental clarity during prayer,
increased intellectual reception in the learning of Torah, livelihood, sexual purity, and the
destruction of evil forces generated by sinful acts. This information is conveyed by the
Hebrew term mikveh, but not necessarily “ritual bath.” Buber translates these terms
literally, but he does not provide the rich background information about Hasidic life in
order to illustrate the Tales more vivaciously. By eliminating potent terminology, I feel
that Buber does not show how Hasidim actually work towards these goals of “ecstatic
joy” and “spiritual wholeness” by fulfilling religious obligations implied by these terms,
and as for the religious obligations themselves, Buber does not elaborate on them at all.
In conclusion, Buber’s introduction presents Hasidism as a life of fervent, ecstatic
joy that is achieved through the spiritual wholeness facilitated by a zaddik. As a
practicing Hasidic Jew, I agreed with Buber’s presentation, but my initiation in the
subject matter and familiarity with the (translated) terminology led me to feel that his
introduction was missing any tangible instruction other than the import to find a zaddik
who can teach by the example of his life, and facilitate spiritual wholeness by uniting
opposites such as heaven and earth. Buber does not elaborate on the particulars of how
this ecstatic joy and spiritual wholeness is achieved by the zaddik and practiced by the
hasidim. I decided to look deeper into Buber’s writing on Hasidim to see if he would
elaborate on these instructions.
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CHAPTER III
BUBER’S RETROSPECTIVES: HASIDISM AS A HEALING
FOR THE CRISIS OF MODERN MAN
In order to explore the context that Buber perhaps conceived for his Tales of the
Hasidism, and to elaborate on the principles of joy and unification outlined in his
introduction, I turned outward from his compilation of legendary anecdotes to examine
Buber’s writings on Hasidic philosophy itself. By reviewing these texts, perhaps we will
also answer the question of why Buber was compelled to share the legends of a mostly
insular culture with so wide and un-initiated an audience, and further explore the theme
of universality expressed in his comments about Rabbi Nahman pouring his spirit out into
all people. Perhaps we will find the “missing piece” I sought in Buber’s introduction,
namely tangible instruction for achieving the Hasidic life of ecstatic joy and spiritual
wholeness through fulfillment of ritual law.
“Hasidism and Modern Man” is actually one of Buber’s last essays on the topic of
Hasidism (written in 1957), but it is a convenient starting point for exploring Buber’s
thoughts, because he makes a self-reflective examination of the changes in his writing
over the years, and provides a universal application for the message of the Hasidic tale.
Buber muses about what impelled him to write about Hasidism and bring knowledge of
this Jewish mystical movement into the larger world. This impetus for osmosis into a
universal context certainly did not originate within the Hasidic philosophy itself, which,
according to Buber, is quite insular.9 Buber wonders if his personal familiarity with
9 We will see this assessment of Hasidism as insular simultaneously confirmed and challenged by researchers such as Mintz and Fader. For example, Fader’s study found that while Hasidic men lead insular lives of religious study and disengagement from the wider secular world, Hasidic women earn college degrees, work, and engage in the larger context of secular New York.
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Hasidism (seen in the vignettes of childhood memory) combined with what he describes
as a “spirit of the times” to bring foreign religions to curious readers, and inspired
multiple projects of translation and presentation of the Hasidic philosophy. Buber asserts
that he differed from other Jewish writers of his time (who he does not name) who saw in
Hasidism only wild superstition. And yet, because he wished to communicate the purity
and loftiness of Hasidism, Buber admits that he ignored the populist element in his
earliest writings on the movement, which left him unsatisfied with their authenticity.
It was about a decade after his first writings on Hasidism (1906 - 1908) that
Buber’s relationship with Hasidism went through a self-described transformation. Buber
became more aware that Hasidism was not so much a teaching as much as it was a way of
life, which is perhaps reflected in the transition of his focus in writing. The Tales of Rabbi
Nahman, Buber’s first compilation of stories (1906), were not legends of actual zaddikim
or hasidim, but rather narratives, that is, complex allegories communicating Hasidic
philosophy, composed by the Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. Published
around forty years later, Tales of Hasidim was a book of anthologized vignettes of the
lives of the Hasidic masters and their students; this trend from narrative allegories to
biographical anecdotes perhaps reflects Buber’s paradigm shift from understanding the
essence of Hasidism no longer as teaching, but as lifestyle.
Despite Buber’s realization of the Hasidic lifestyle, he decided that he himself
could not live a Hasidic life, and that to masquerade as a Hasid would be farcical. Yet he
still felt called to a task. “I believed that one might relate to [Hasidic literature] merely as
an observer. Since then I have realized that the teaching is there that one may learn it and
the way that one may walk on it” (Buber, 4). With this line, Buber indicates that there
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was some internal tension about his immersion the Hasidic folklore, without fully
immersing in the Hasidic lifestyle. However he does not further elaborate this
biographical aspect.10
Despite his own choice not to adopt the Hasidic lifestyle, and
despite what Buber refers to as the decay of the Hasidic movement after the fifth
generation, he writes that Hasidism still provides “an answer to the crisis of Western man
that has become fully manifest in our age” (ibid., 5). A movement which arose from the
ashes of the false messianic Sabbatian catastrophe created a spiritual awakening which
hallowed everyday life by making the mundane sacred; according to Buber, a movement
born from crisis can provide an answer for the crisis of today, which stems from the
illness of separation between body and spirit, sacred and profane.
Generally, Buber writes, a separation between sacred and profane is a founding
tenet of religion. Indeed, it would seem that Judaism is also built on this principle of
separation, and Buber draws proof for this by citing the benediction recited at the end of
the Sabbath, which speaks of separating the Sabbath from the rest of the week, the sacred
from the profane. However, Buber tells us that one only needs to look at the ubiquitous
presence of blessings in Judaism, recited over such acts as eating food, donning a new
shirt, building a new house, and many other daily activities, to realize that Judaism does
not forever separate the sacred from the profane, but rather allows the sacred to permeate
all aspects of life; furthermore, Hasidism takes this permeation of the holy within the
mundane to new level of devotion and intensity. “G-d dwells wherever one lets him in,”
Buber quotes a Hasidic saying, and tells us that in the Hasidic view, the profane is really
the not-yet-hallowed (7).
10 Mintz and Fader also discuss this internal tension as Jews researching Hasidism and elaborate on it further.
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Buber posits that the crisis of modern man has been explained by many different
philosophers; for example, Marx attributes the crisis to alienation caused by economic
factors, and psychoanalysts to personal neurosis. Buber sees all these ideas as solutions
addressing the symptoms, but not the true illness. Buber posits that the true problem is
the separation of the sacred and the profane, but Hasidism offers the solution. “Man
cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human; he can approach Him through
becoming human. To become human is what he, this individual man, has been created
for” (15). To be human is to be whole, living in a state of unity—as opposed to the
fragmented existence of modern man. Buber sees this human wholeness as the eternal
core of the Hasidic philosophy, and the Hasidic legend is the vehicle for carrying this
concept into the larger world, a palliative that can be ingested by a broken and suffering
world, disillusioned by the holocaust and two world wars. What the Hasidic legend offers
then, is a message of human wholeness, and that wholeness facilitates the ecstatic joy
Buber writes about in his introduction. Indeed, ecstatic joy bursting into the quotidian
present through the realization of wholeness is but a momentary cure. Yet, by illustrating
for us thousands of anecdotes in the biographies of the Hasidic masters—who experience
this realization in many different vignettes from real life—Buber shows us that it is
possible to achieve a life-long cure, and emerge into a utopian, hallowed life11
. However,
11 Interestingly, Buber does not address the Holocaust, neither in Tales of the Hasidism nor in these essays that we explore. I cannot propose to speak for Buber’s gross omission of this topic (even in his later, more self-reflective writings), but I will present three possibilities. (1) Buber did not experience the horror of the death camps personally, unlike other authors (such as Elie Wiesel) who did, and incorporated those memories into their Hasidic storytelling (see Cooper’s article “But I Will Tell of Their Deeds,” which we will discuss later). (2) Alternatively, perhaps Buber did not feel equipped to address this topic, much in the style of Adorno’s comment “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.” (3) Our own reflection of the Holocaust is magnified because of its closeness to this generation. We should consider that the Sabbatian messianic disillusionment which Buber discusses was a spiritual crisis of disastrous enormity, especially when we regard the frustration engendered by the failure of this “messianic” figure to release European Jewry from one and half millennia of persecution. When Buber posits Hasidism as a solution to
27
after reading this essay, I still felt that Buber did not provide tangible instruction for
achieving that unity between opposites in order to facilitate “becoming human,” and so I
continued to work through his work through his writing.
The spiritual solution of Hasidism as a cure for the general ills of modern day life
is a theme further explored by Buber in his work Hasidism, especially in the chapter “The
Beginnings of Hasidism,” wherein Buber focuses on the genesis of the Hasidic
movement as a response to the catastrophe of Shabbetai Tzvi, the false messiah, and how
a movement born as a response to spiritual crisis can be the curative response to the
spiritual crisis of today. In the scholarly sense, Buber sees nothing new about Hasidism; it
only took selections from the Kabbalah and reworked them. The true genius and
originality in the movement is that it created a teaching based on a way of life, and not a
way of life based on a teaching. It is a theology that can be carried out not only by the
esoteric and segregated holy hermits, but the everyday common people, who can emulate
the life of the master by their proximity to his daily example. Within this community
arises an inner circle around the master-zaddik, and the members of this inner circle carry
on the teaching of the zaddik through their own lives.
Buber is referring here to the circle of disciples that developed around the Baal
Shem Tov, and then again around his main disciple, the Maggid of Mezritch, from which
many diverse streams of Hasidic philosophy would emerge. This “spiritual flowering” of
Sabbatianism, he implies that the Hasidic ideals of the first six generations are also applicable to the ills of the present day, which means, that in Buber’s time, the message of utopian hope, human wholeness, and ecstatic joy can be found even in the wake of the Holocaust. Buber was unable to illustrate this connection directly, because in his view, the spiritual flame of Hasidism had already burned out before the twentieth century, so there are no Hasidic anecdotes linked to the horrors of the death camps (we will find this challenged in our ethnographic exploration of Hasidic lore). What Hasidism offered, we would have to apply in our own lives by taking from the examples it provided in the first six generations. Therefore, Buber omits the Holocaust. Hasidism was a response to Sabbatianism, but it can be applied as a cure to the ills of any generation.
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master, community, and inner circle continued for five generations, before (according to
Buber) it degenerated into factionist strife and the very elitism Hasidism initially
rejected12
. According to Buber, the zaddik, or master, of each community is not a human
paragon (although in Hebrew word zaddik implies a perfectly righteous individual;
perhaps Buber is trying to highlight the humanism of the zaddikim, their accessibility,
and love for the common man). The true spiritual contribution of the zaddik towards the
spiritual growth of his followers, or his Hasidim, is not his own spiritual perfection, but
rather that he draws men together in a brotherly connection by drawing them all closer to
that which they believe.
According to Buber, because Hasidism is not so much a philosophy as it is a way
of living, the Hasidic legend is the main way of communicating the teaching, for in the
legend, we read about the actions of the zaddik. The theological writings are merely
footnotes for the main text, which is the legend. According to Buber, although the
legends have become embellished and corrupted over the centuries, he asserts that for one
who knows how to read the legends, they offer a glimpse of the heartbeat of Hasidic life:
the relationship between the master and his students. Even if the miracles transcribed did
not occur exactly the way they are phrased, it contained the core of the magic spell that
the zaddik had woven over his disciples, who communicated their wonderment in the
language of miracles.
Of utmost importance for Buber is how Hasidism developed in the wake of the
Sabbatian crisis. The disillusionment of a false messiah and his empty promises left the
Jewish community of Europe in a state of shock and despair. And yet, it would be a
12 One of the foundational appeals of Hasidim was its rejection of the necessity of scholarship as the only path to religious experience, in favor of the simple, enthusiastic devotion of the common folk.
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mistake to say that Hasidism was a total reformation of Judaism, for it drew on many of
same theological themes that had been perverted by Shabbatai Tzvi. In Sabbatianism,
Gnostic ritual prevailed, and the messianic figure had to enter into the dirt and filth of the
world in order to reveal that the unholy was indeed holy. The drawback to this system
was that in the process of entering this filth, the idea of sin disappeared entirely, and the
yoke of the Torah commandments was cast off and forgotten entirely: it could no longer
be true to the ideals of Judaism.
The union of man with a God who dwells with man “in the midst of his
uncleanliness,” and the power of the redemption to overcome all barriers (including those
between holy and profane) may have been carried to an extreme in Sabbateanism, which
divested these themes of all connection to the Jewish faith; but these elements of
connection to the divine and messianic redemption were actually central to Buber’s
understanding of Judaism, and found full revitalization in Hasidism. Buber posits Jacob
Frank and the Baal Shem Tov as the two respondents to the Sabbatian crisis. Frank
carried the post-Sabbatian climate to new levels of Gnostic perversion; the Baal Shem
Tov reclaimed the themes of redemption, union, and divine service, and carried them to
new levels of life. Sabbateanism left a rift between the Jews and G-d that needed to be
healed, and the Baal Shem Tov stepped into the role of healer by repairing the rift
between man and G-d, body and soul.
Buber sees it as no coincidence that both Jacob Frank and the Baal Shem Tov
came to the fore in the region of Podolia, where Turkish Jews could still recall the
tragedy of Shabbetai Tzvi. He relates a story about the interaction between the Baal Shem
Tov and Shabbetai Tzvi to indicative the difference between them. When the Baal Shem
30
Tov decided to do some spiritual healing work on the soul of the deceased false messiah
in order to elevate his tortured soul from gehennom, Shabbetai came to the Besht in a
dream. He tempted the Besht (the story is unclear about the nature of the temptation),
whereupon the Baal Shem Tov hurled the pretender back into the abyss. Buber believes
that Tzvi was tempting the Besht to follow in his own path and claim the title of messiah.
Therein lies the difference: Sabbateanism hurries the end, and Tzvi claims the
eschatological title of messiah; the Besht rejects this rushing towards the final hour, and
instead embraces the idea that “everything points to necessity of returning to the
beginning” where G-d can be found in the here and now (Buber, 17). The zaddik does not
attempt to be the messiah, but rather, he facilitates the discovery of a messianic light in
the everyday acts of his Hasidim.
The zaddik figure, according to Buber, was drawn from precedents in Kabbalah
and popular tradition, but received new meaning in the Hasidic context. The zaddik
became a leader of his community and the greater community of Israel, an intermediary
between man and G-d, and yet, he continued to foster the individual connection of each
Hasid to the divine. However, Buber states that the development of this zaddik role can
only be understood against the backdrop of crisis, namely, the decay of enthusiasm for
the Torah, attributable to the cold, elitist, scholarly circle of Rabbis on the one hand, and
the fervent, anti-climactic, false messianism of Shabbetai Tzvi on the other.
The zaddik steps into this milieu of disintegration and disillusionment, into a role
which is no longer focused on scholarly achievement, but rather piety. Buber sees Polish
Jewry after the Sabbatian crisis as a people craving a leader who could show them what
to do in a time of indecision. And yet, while “the hasidic leaders undertook responsibility
31
for the souls entrusted to them...at the same time they kept alive in them the spark of
responsibility” (Buber, 19). While Jacob Frank, the successor to Tzvi, wished to replace
the Torah with his own perverted Gnosticism, the zaddik sought to become a living
Torah, a life of teaching.
The zaddik is very involved in the mundane, everyday lives of his Hasidim, and
sees to it that their practical needs are taken care of; it is an organic connection, and a
mutual bond, in contradistinction to the earlier system, where the scholarly rabbi sat
learning separated from the mass of uneducated people by great oceans of text. To
facilitate this connection, there were many types of zaddikim, each who attracted a
particular type of follower (there were thirty-six hidden, and thirty six revealed zaddikim,
according to the Besht). The plurality of Hasidism made it very appealing to the masses,
because they could gravitate towards the zaddik with whose personality, deeds, or
teaching the felt the most affinity. Whereas for Jacob Frank, ignorance was celebrated as
an excuse to forgo the Torah, the average Hasid acknowledged his own ignorance, but
did not relinquish the effort. He said the psalms, said the prayers, and did the simple work
he could, until the moment came, when, by virtue of his simplicity, he saved the world.
Perhaps his simple, heartfelt prayer pierced the heavens and carried all the other prayers
to G-d; perhaps his joyous dance raised the spirits of a burdened zaddik; the emphasis
moved from scholarly achievement, to achievements of honest, simple piety fueled by the
passionate heart. The simple folk would not attempt to hurry the end and enter into the
messianic future, but rather “to serve G-d with the strength given to him in each hour of
life” (Buber, 24). This is the philosophy of Hasidism that Buber outlines in “The
Beginnings of Hasidism,” a movement that seeks to find the messianic future in the
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present, in response to the epic failure of a movement that sought to end the present and
usher in the messianic future. Of utmost importance in facilitating the Hasidic lifestyle is
attachment to a zaddik, whose living example and guidance provide the Hasidim with the
path to spiritual wholeness and ecstatic joy; this zaddik is in contradistinction to a
charlatan such as Shabbetai Tzvi, or Jacob Frank. In this essay, which Buber began by
defining Hasidism as a response to messianic catastrophe, I felt that Buber drew one step
closer to tangible instruction regarding how one could enter into a Hasidic existence by
explaining the necessity of learning from the actions of a zaddik, but in comparison to the
Hasidic life I had observed, I still felt that his material was lacking direction because of
his omission of reference to Jewish Law. And if Buber did not believe that Jewish Law
was an integral component of Hasidism, what exactly did the zaddik do in order to show
his hasidim the way to becoming human? I continued to look through Buber’s writing.
In his essay “The Foundation Stone,” Buber outlines the driving forces of the
Hasidic movement’s initial development. Buber classifies Hasidism as a revolt of the
common, ignorant man, or amei-haaretz (literally people of the land) against the scale of
values that placed the erudite and scholarly rabbi at the top. According to Buber, in order
to understand the tremendous influence of this eastern-European spiritual movement, one
must understand the democratic strain it contained. The disparity of inequality in life is so
prevalent and heartbreaking, that it cannot, Buber asserts, be allowed to penetrate into the
heart of spirituality, and so, Hasidism as a revolution validates the fundamental nature of
religion as a place of universal equality, where all men can come into contact with G-d.
Such a revolution in spirituality can only take place if it has been preceded by a
similar revolution in society at large, but Buber does not want us to overestimate the
33
contribution of outside influences over spiritual rebirth. Buber sees mysticism as a
historical trend, a response to an inner crisis of religion (for example, the false messiah
Shabbetai Tzvi), and not as a response to greater historical factors. Mysticism “endows
this religion with a wealth of new vital power…and renews them from within, it restores
to religion its binding power (Buber, 37). Mysticism does not come from greater societal
changes without, but is made from the very material that the religion is made from; it is a
renewal, drawn from the deep roots that perhaps became lost through time and space.
This mysticism, or this renewal, is what Hasidism is to Judaism, and all humankind.
Shabbatai Tzvi converted to Islam, and his successor Jacob Frank to Christianity,
but this apostasy was only a symptom of the illness that had permeated Judaism, and “the
poison can only be overcome by a powerful anecdote” (Buber, 38). Even the common
man, far removed from the catastrophe, was feeling the illness in the struggle of his
connection to G-d. The poison was “the lust for overrunning reality” the rushing through
life towards an illusory messianic end, a dream that could only be shattered with the
catastrophe of a false messiah (Buber, 39). Hasidism was the palliative that restored the
health of religion, not by consciously trying to be the cure, but rather, by just existing. It
was not a life led by teaching, but rather, a teaching led by life, which led men back to
union with G-d. This existence of union cannot be “reflexive” and philosophical, but
rather, vital, in direct contact with simple reality.
The common man is attracted to such a movement, and lays the foundation for
new leadership, such as the Baal Shem Tov, whose appearance is “the fundamental act of
Hasidism” (41). He was not a leader who led with complex mystical philosophies, but
rather, captured his followers with honest simplicity of his words. “Whoever has heard
34
him feels that the speech is directed at him,” Buber writes (44). Buber explains that the
pithy aphorisms of the Baal Shem Tov captured his own heart, for even though the
concepts had been repeated before, it was as if, in the words of the Besht, they had been
said for the first time. The Besht is a leader who does not live in the proverbial ivory
tower13
, engrossed in works of mysticism for the benefit of his own spiritual journey, but
rather, is engaged in a real relationship with G-d and his fellow man; he is a real person,
in a real life, whose real words connect to the real people, and help them find G-d in the
reality of their own lives.
Buber sees Judaism as inherently dualistic, and the Torah expresses this duality of
light and dark, day and night, good and evil, urging man to reject the bad and live by the
good. And yet, the concept of the “end of days” poses a problem, a third area, a “grey
space,” a future where the holy fills the earth, and there is no room for the profane.
Sabbateanism takes this disappearance of duality as the starting point, and assumes that
the messianic future has arrived. And yet, rather than pushing away the choice for evil,
Sabbateanism asks its followers to grab hold of it and “transform” it into holiness. The
evil is shattered by the holy man (and all men are holy) descending into it and redeeming
it. The assumption here is that man has already reached a state of perfection, and is
capable of transforming the evil into good. This is a tendency of Gnosticism that appears
throughout history in various religions, but for the Jews, it culminated in the
disappointment of Shabbetai Tzvi, who ultimately rejected the Torah altogether. The
messianic movement went from the embrace of evil in order to elevate it into good, to the
total embrace of evil itself, fully rejecting the good and holy. In face of this
13 However, it is interesting to note that for many years the Besht practiced extended periods of seclusion in the mountains.
35
disappointment, the common people returned to their mundane lives, their religious
enthusiasm cooled.
Into this climate of spiritual illness stepped the bearer of the cure: the Baal Shem
Tov. Whereas Shabbetai Tzvi had encouraged the embrace of the forbidden, the Baal
Shem Tov encouraged man to throw off the disguise of the mundane world, to seek the
godliness within, without embracing the forbidden. The Hasidic philosophy was that
everything permissible could be elevated by bringing it into the service of G-d, and it was
a philosophy that could redeem the common man from a reality seemingly devoid of
meaning and filled only with struggle. The Baal Shem Tov encouraged his followers to
do everything with spiritual intent, so that body and soul could be united, and thereby, G-
d and the world. “In every movement that he performs, in every word that he utters, man
must direct his being towards union,” Buber writes, and then cites the example that a
businessman, according the Hasidic philosophy, should conduct his financial affairs with
a mind devoted to the love and friendship of all people (57).
In every hour, man is called to perform some spiritual task, and thereby renews a
spiritual relationship with G-d and reality. “Only by way of true intercourse with things
and beings that man achieves true life…he can take an active part in the redemption of
the world,” Buber summarizes (58). Whereas previous messianic revolts, such as
Christianity and Sabbateanism, separated themselves from Judaism, Hasidism stayed
within the boundaries of the Torah. Instead of demanding that man regard the holy
messianic future as having arrived, Hasidism accepted reality, and suggested that man
hallow what he can in his everyday life, and thereby find the messianic present.
36
In summary, Buber’s essay “The Foundation Stone” explores the causes of the
Hasidic movement. In his opinion, a general spiritual illness stemming from the
disparagement of the common man in favor of scholarly rabbinic elitism, was
exacerbated by the messianic catastrophe of Shabbetai Tzvi. The Baal Shem Tov stepped
in to affect a spiritual cure for the common masses, by creating a movement where body
and soul could be united, and instead of rushing towards the messianic end, man could
discover the messianic future.
In “The Spirit and Body of the Hasidic Movement,” Buber further examines the
revolutionary theme of Hasidism, and defines what he perceives to be the essence of the
movement. Whereas revolutions in society often attack their own roots, revolutions in
religion are more geared toward reformation than severance; therefore, Hasidism did not
reject Judaism, but rather, rediscovered and disseminated what had always been part of
the tradition. Hasidism took over and united two traditions, one being the system of
commandments and laws (Torah), and the other being the mystical science of the
kabbalah. The union of Torah and Kabbalah had occurred before with the educated and
spiritually privileged kabbalists, but until Hasidism, it had yet to join with the reality of
“life” and “community.”
In this essay, Buber posits that the “central idea” of Hasidism was the kabbalistic
notion of discovering G-dliness hidden in the material world, and “the principle of man’s
responsibility for G-d’s fate in the world” (64). That is, to the degree of sanctity that man
brings to his everyday actions, G-d is revealed in the world. For whatever reason, G-d
desired that man would find Him, so he disguised Himself within in his creation, and left
it up to man to connect through spiritual efforts. “The shells of the world exist that he
37
break through them, to the core” (Buber, 68). Previously, mysticism was eschatological,
schematized, and ascetic. Hasidism brought this mystical concept of discovering G-d to
the common man, so that the realization of his daily labor as the “shell” would lead him
to understand that “the issue is to do the one appointed task, the common, obvious tasks
of daily life, according to their truth and according to their meaning” (Buber, 72). This
kabbalstic notion of discovering G-dliness in the mundane in no way rejected the Law (of
the Torah), and by notifying us of this fact, Buber implies that the Torah Law does play a
role in Hasidism.
In order to translate the “how” of the movement as opposed to the “what,” it
would be necessary for a chain of teachers and disciples to pass along the instruction, for
the written word would not suffice. The goal of the Hasidic life is not just to follow the
Law, but to become a living embodiment thereof. “The men who are truly a Torah called
zaddiks, the righteous, the right ones. They are the bearers of the hasidic teaching, not
only as its apostles, but more as its effective reality. They are the teaching” (Buber 74).
This definition of zaddik is more specific than the definition in Buber’s introduction to
Tales of the Hasidim, where he defines the zaddik as one who has passed some undefined
spiritual test. And furthermore, by specifying that Hasidism did not throw off the yoke of
the Torah, but rather encouraged its followers to embody the law in their daily lives,
especially by following the example of the zaddikim, Buber here comes closest to
providing tangible instruction regarding the Hasidic path: the zaddikim embody the law
of the Torah; the hasidim live by their example, achieve wholeness, and thereby ecstatic
joy, which is the messianic future—found in the present.
38
Buber asserts that we must understand the difference between Christianity and
Judaism; whereas the former has a fixed calendar point for the messianic arrival, in
Judaism, since that time has not yet arrived, it is always on the horizon, and always able
to permeate the present. Therefore, unlike a priest or a monk, who ritualistically renews a
finished act of salvation, the zaddik puts his hand to the ongoing task of life. “He is the
man who has truly become human,” Buber concludes (76). He brings blessing from
heaven down to earth, and from earth to the heavens; he is the unifier of worlds, and of
G-d and man; “constant renewal is the guiding principal of the zaddik’s life” (77). Buber
thereby again links the encounter with a messianic future within the present to the idea of
unification, and further highlights the nature of Hasidism to facilitate “becoming human.”
Despite the zaddik’s knowledge of mystical letter combinations and theurigic
powers14
, there is no secret formula for achieving holiness according to the Hasidic
philosophy, but only the hallowing of everyday life, and “this hallowing of the everyday
stands above all magic15
” (Buber, 81). He writes further that he “central desire of the
zaddik is to hallow that which is worldly” (ibid.). In addition to their kabbalistic prowess,
prayer is one of the services that leads to rapturous connection with G-d, but the zaddik is
not content, according to Buber, to live just with this. He must mix and mingle with the
common man and address his concerns, and that human love is the vehicle for
unification, “for the unity of love of all people is the chariot of [divine presence]” (86).
The zaddik’s mundane conversations contain mystical secrets; his meals are like the
sacrificial services of the ancient temple. Thus, Buber sees the zaddik as an exemplary
14
Manipulations of sacred names of G-d in order to achieve desired effects in reality 15 By “magic” Buber here perhaps means kabbalistic ritual
39
figure who leads this life of spiritual meaning, wholeness, and unity, so that as he mixes
and mingles with the amei ha’aretz (the common man) they may learn from his example.
Buber defines three circles on which “the love of the zaddik stands the test” (87).
This “love” is his aforementioned connection to the common man, and his facilitation of
brotherhood between men, which unifies people and makes a vehicle for the divine
presence. Furthermore, this reference to a “test” sheds light on Buber’s description of the
zaddik in the introduction of Tales of the Hasidim, since there he mentions that the zaddik
is “the proven” or “one who stands the test.” The love of the zaddik holds up in these
three circles despite the challenges of everyday life, which make spiritual immersion and
realization difficult to readily achieve, and these three circles are: the transient crowd that
seeks his help, the local community that shares common living conditions, and his
disciples.
The “transient folk” are those who might come to the zaddik on a festival,
carrying a letter filled with petitions, which are more often than not, petitions for
everyday things such as livelihood, children, health. These transient folk seek advice or a
blessing from the spiritual giant, and the zaddik effects a healing whereby the one cured
will find the inner strength to carry out the completion of his task with his own efforts. As
for the “community members,” these may be followers of the zaddik, or they may non-
Hasidic misnagdim (opponents) who live in the same region. According to Buber, the
leader of this opposing force is the “Rav,” who obtains his prestige through knowledge of
the halacha and his ability to address questions and concerns in Jewish law16
(Buber, 89).
Although the zaddik became a leader primarily through his piety, fear of G-d, and fervor,
there were instances where the Rav was also familiar with the Kabbalah, and the Rebbe
16 Mintz informs us that Hasidim will also appoint a Rav for addressing halachic inquiries in the community
40
was also knowledgeable in Jewish law. Here, Buber cites the example of the Gaon of
Vilna17
, a staunch opponent of Hasidism (yet also a master of the Kabbalah), and Shneur
Zalman of Liaidi18
, author of the mystical work “Tanya,” who wrote a code of Jewish
Law. Thus, even while Buber seems to oversimplify the opposition of Hasidism to non-
Hasidic Jewry, he acknowledges that the misnagdim and hasidim may mingle, both on
the common and scholarly level.
The third circle, and that which is most apropos to Tales of the Hasidim, is that of
the disciples, who grow close to the zaddik, and may even live in his household. This
circle is where the tradition is passed down through the generations. To cite the
connection between the zaddik and his Hasidim, Buber brings a story of Rabbi Nahum of
Chernobyl. One Shabbos afternoon, at the holy third meal of the Sabbath, his disciples
were sitting around the table and lamenting the days they had wasted in trivial pursuits,
and feeling as if their spiritual work had amounted to nothing; only their connection to
the zaddik Rabbi Nahum could give them comfort, and immediately they set out to
Chernobyl to see him. At this very moment, Rabbi Nahum was sitting at his own table,
feeling a similar despondency over the squandered days of his life; it was only the fact
that his Hasidism were joined to him that provided him with solace. He rose to the door,
and saw his disciples approaching. “In that moment did the circle close,” Buber writes,
highlighting the connection of this inner circle to the master (91).
17 Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720-1791) regarded as the foremost Torah authority by non-Hasidic orthodox Jewry in the last several centuries. 18 Referred to as the “Alter Rebbe” (the Old Rebbe) by Chabad Hasidim; the first Rebbe of Chabad. 1745 -1812.
41
These three circles (the transient, the community, and the disciples) “indicate the
various moving forces of which the vitality of the hasidic movement was built up”
(Buber, 93). While Hasidism was founded on the chain of transmission from disciple to
student, it was a movement open to Jews of all types, classes, and intellects: rich and
poor, uneducated and learned, pious ones and sinners alike. As long as the teaching was
pure, the transmission straightforward, and the character populist, Hasidism was “great
and fruitful” (Buber, 94). Unfortunately, Buber does not elaborate in this essay on the
particulars of how the movement degenerated, although by now we have noticed a
general trend of Buber’s whereby he concludes his essay by asserting that the spiritual
power of Hasidism is no longer apparent in the movement itself (due to what Buber
perceives as its decay), but that the spiritual germ of brilliance is available to address the
problems of the current day, for both Jews and non-Jews alike.
In summary (if we were to these four essays into one message “The Beginnings of
Hasidism,” “The Foundation Stone,” “Spirit and Body of the Hasidic Movement” and
“Hasidism and Modern Man” we could say that) Martin Buber perceives Hasidism
historically as a response to the spiritual ills which had engendered and culminated in the
Sabbatian crisis. Hasidism was a mystical movement that helped the common man find
the messianic future in his own mundane present. Finally, beyond the historical
community of Hasidic Jewry which existed and thrived in the first six generations of the
movement, Hasidism offers a message of wholeness, peace, and unity, while addressing
the general ills of the modern man, who suffers from the separation of body and spirit. In
Buber’s earlier writing he may have been referring to the “modern man” of the early
twentieth century, caught in the confusion of diverse streams of thought vying for his
42
loyalty. However, the dates of Buber’s later essays, wherein he still posits Hasidism as a
cure, indicate that despite the horrors of the Second World War and a Holocaust, he still
holds onto the utopian ideal of human wholeness and ecstatic joy. In his foreword to the
1948 edition of Hasidism, Buber again reflects on over four decades of his involvement
in Hasidic writings and stories, and his desire for communicating to the greater world
the fundamental core that he perceives as the essence of Hasidic truth, which is of vital
importance to all mankind, “at this particular hour more important than ever
before...when we are in danger of forgetting for what purpose we are on earth”
(foreword). So important is that which Hasidism has to offer, that he will “carry it into
the world against its will,” implying that Buber’s task is to take Hasidism beyond its
historical boundaries (which may be isolationist and insular), and offer the Hasidic
message to the larger world (ibid.). In his essays, Buber takes Hasidism beyond the status
of a cure for healing the spiritual illness culminating in Sabbatianism (which he directly
states) and wholesale destruction of European Jewry (which is implied by the dates of his
later essays), and presents it as a palliative for all mankind.
Thus, applying Buber’s perspective of Hasidism as explained in these four essays
to the stories in Tales of the Hasidim, we can understand that the Hasidic legends are
sacred anecdotes of men who unified body and spirit, and found the messianic future in
their present reality. Indeed, if Buber’s introduction to the anthology leaves some gaps in
the instructions of how to achieve the Hasidic goal, these four essays provide more
information: the zaddik embodies the Law to the point of becoming a living Torah; the
hasidim learn how to live from their zaddik, and in this process of learning, they achieve
human wholeness and ecstatic joy. Buber’s essays on Hasidism addressed my question
43
about the particulars of how to achieve the Hasidic reality described in his anthology of
legends. But why was Buber not more explicit about these instructions in his
introduction? Why did he not elaborate on what exactly was implied by the zaddik
becoming an embodiment of the Law? Furthermore, Buber’s translation of almost every
Hebrew word into German (other than zaddik and hasid), which obscured the clarity of
the concepts he wished to communicate, and his omission of any discussion of the
importance of Jewish Law (Halacha) in Hasidism, left me questioning if Buber painted an
accurate portrait of Hasidism in his Tales of The Hasidim.
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CHAPTER IV
HASIDISM TODAY: BUBER’S FORGOTTEN DEMOGRAPHIC,
STORYTELLING CONTEXTS, AND THE REBBE
Ayala Fader in Mitzvah Girls: Bringing up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews
in Brooklyn (2009) reflects on time she spent researching Hasidic women in Hasidic
girl’s schools and Hasidic homes in the New York urban area. This study was particularly
interesting in relation to my reading of Buber, because not only did it describe real life,
modern day Hasidim, but it also specifically focused on a demographic that was entirely
missing from Buber’s work: women19
. In seven chapters, Fader (a self-described secular
Israeli Jew) discusses several issues in the life of today’s Hasidic women of New York,
including how girls are raised to fit in with expectations about their roles as mothers,
wives, and members of the community, how they navigate the bilingual realm of Yiddish
and English, and their daily transitions between the insular religious Hasidic world, and
the modern American world in which they work. Fader interviews Bobov, Satmyr,
Viznitz, Chabad20
, and “unaffiliated” Hasidic women, drawing the conclusion that
19 Fader writes that the purpose of her study is to understand how “Hasidic women teach their daughters to take on their responsibilities and become observant Jewish women” (1). While she does examines gender roles in the greater context of present day Hasidic life in New York City through interviews and fieldwork, in an interview with the Forward (1/21/2010) she stated that her decision to pursue this project was motivated by her personal fascination with Hasidic Jews, the dearth of research on Hasidism’s use of Yiddish, and the topic of childrearing. However, despite her personal research objectives, we can view her study as part of the ongoing, growing tradition of gender-related scholarship regarding subcultures (such as Hasidism in America). Third wave feminism has acknowledged that categories like class, ethnicity, religion, etc. may complicate the study of women as a monolithic cross-cultural group, and has raised awareness that theories can be influenced by context, calling into question the relationship between the anthropologist and their informants. Many recent studies have examined gender segregated societies, such as studies of the “veil” and “seclusion” in Islam and Hinduism. Fader’s research can be seen as part of these examinations of “traditional” gender-segregated societies. Furthermore, as a woman researcher, she was able to capture a study of a demographic (Hasidic women) that could not have been easily research by men, because of the gender-segregated nature of Hasidic culture. 20 These are names for different Hasidic Courts, often named for the European town of their origin. Chabad is an exception to this rule; it is an acronym for the combination of intellectual faculties of
45
today’s generation of Hasidim in New York are more religiously stringent than the
generation before, necessitating “new forms of femininity, which include their
participation in the secular city around them” (Fader, 1). They must learn to navigate
between the religious stringencies of their home and community life, and the American
culture which in many ways carries values opposite to the ones they have at home.
The book does not touch on Hasidic storytelling so much, but in the chapter
where Fader discusses what is done with girls who defy behavioral expectations, she cites
an example to show that girls are not encouraged to ask too many questions about
information that is not necessary for Hasidic women to know in the role of mothers and
wives. A teacher is telling a story about a sage who was studying the Mishna21
at a very
young age, when a student asks what the Mishna is; the teacher replies “when you
become a boy, you’ll understand” (Fader, 74). The anecdote is meant to illustrate lack of
access to certain areas of men’s learning, and how questions are deflected with humor or
invalidation, but additionally we can glean that even if the girls are not privy to the study
of the religious texts themselves, storytelling about sages or Tzadikim is for everyone,
including women22
and children. However, women are not present at male gatherings
chochma-bina-daas (wisdom-knowledge-understanding). However, Chabad is also referred to as Lubavitch, the town of its origin. 21 The Mishna is comprised of six orders of “oral Torah” which explains many details relevant to halachic fulfillment of the Five Books of Moses (Pentateuch) 22Hasidic stories told by and/or featuring women is a topic that would benefit from scholarly expansion. In his article “The Great Holy Woman Malka of Beltz: Women as Heroes and Storytellers in Hasidic Tales,” Justin Jaron Lewis contrasts what he perceives as the dearth of woman-related storytelling in Jewish biblical texts (Torah) to woman related storytelling in Hasidism. Despite the fact Hasidic stories are generally about (male) Hasidic Rebbes, women are occasionally featured in the Hasidic tale. Often they are enablers who strengthen the spiritual resolve of their husbands (such as encouraging them to rise early and learn or pray) but occasionally they are featured as the protagonist in the role of healer, guide, or spiritual advisor, such as Malka of Beltz, the wife of Rebbe Sholom of Beltz. Lewis attributes the greater (although still marginalized) presence of female storytelling in Hasidism to the Hasidic emphasis on storytelling in general, which is accessible to everyone—unlike normative Jewish textual study, where
46
where storytelling may be featured, such as the Tisch23
, and Fader does not elaborate on
how Hasidic storytelling is incorporated into the lives of Hasidic women. She does
mention a genre of “Jewish” books published for Hasidic children, some of which are
modeled on secular literature, but these books are primarily for entertainment woven
together with moral instruction; they are not stories of the Hasidic Rebbes (Fader, 114).
From my own experience, I know there are indeed contexts where women can
participate in Hasidic storytelling. For example, the Rabbi in shul (synagogue) may tell a
story about a Rebbe as part of his Shabbos Drasha (Sabbath sermon). A baal habos (head
of the household) may share a Hasidic story at a Shabbos or Yuntiff (holiday) meal; I have
been to meals where women also shared a story about a Rebbe, such as the Lubavitcher
Rebbe. There are also a number of books from religious publishers such as Artscroll that
contain Hasidic stories, both anthologies of stories specifically, and books about other
topics (mussar [ethics] halacha [law] or chumash [Torah]) that are sprinkled with Hasidic
lore. In fact, storytelling about Rabbinic luminaries is common even in the non-Hasidic
orthodox world, where stories of the Vilna Gaon and other non-Hasidic rabbis are shared
verbally and in print. The fact that Hasidic stories are retold in familial settings (such as
the home or in books) underscores the nature of the Hasidic legend to communicate
male-centered narratives are studied by a male audience. I would challenge Lewis’s assessment of classical Jewish texts (Torah) since there are indeed many narratives featuring women, such as the narratives with the matriarchs (Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel) in Genesis, and other books (such as the Megillat Esther) where the protagonist is actually a woman. However, Lewis does acknowledge that due to the influence of Hasidic storytelling and feminism, woman-centered storytelling is on the rise in Judaism. He cites the example of digitized contexts where women share stories online about acts of Chesed (kindness/charity) they have experienced, heard, or participated in, since charitable activities are a social outlet for religious women and a source of storytelling. 23 Literally “table,” the Tisch is a gathering of Hasidim at the table of the Rebbe, who may share a Torah-related thought, possibly accompanied by Hasidic storytelling. The Hasidim often join him in the singing of wordless melodies (niggunim), and in some circles, he may hand out portions of food from his plate (shirayim).
47
Hasidic philosophy through the accessible illustration of how the Rebbe actually lives out
the Hasidic lifestyle, a theme that Buber writes about in his introduction when he
mentions that Hasidim learn from the actions of the zaddik (Buber, 6).
In the chapter “Making English Jewish” Fader also touches on a theme that Buber
describes, the elevation of the mundane into the spiritual. Fader cites the practice of
Chabad Hasidim to appropriate secular music for spiritual purposes, such as when the
Lubavitcher Rebbe took a jingle from a Pepsi commercial and used it as a melody for
prayer and meditation (89). Fader discusses in particular how “the modern world and its
language [English] can be civilized through syncreticism with the Jewish languages of
Yiddish and loshn-koydesh24
” (89). Fader describes language use as somewhat of a
struggle for the Hasidim. Because the older generation of New York Hasidim speaks
mainly English, and yet they want their children to speak Yiddish, a mixture of Hasidic
English and Hasidic Yiddish has developed as the lingua franca, but “religious concepts,
holidays, and aspects of ritual or Hasidic life are not translated into English” (104). Since
Buber frequently translates these religious terms from the original Hebrew (or as Fader
would describe it, loshn-koydesh) his rendition of the tales differs from the more
authentic form of their oral retelling as they would be told by actual Hasidim. Hasidim
would not use terms like “house-father” or “bath of immersion” or “Feast of
Tabernacles.” 25
Rather Hasidim would use terms like baal habos, mikveh, and Succos
instead of translating the terms into English.
24 “Loshn koydesh” literally means “holy tongue/speech” a word to describe biblical Hebrew, believed to have a sacred quality lacking in modern Hebrew 25 These examples are taken from Tales of the Hasidim, where Buber quotes Rabbi Jacob Joseph of Polnoye as saying: “On the Sabbath, I act like any house-father” (101). He relates how the Baal Shem Tov
48
In addition to its association with holiness, another reason for the imposed
revitalization of Yiddish in younger generations is the nostalgic association of life in the
alte heim (the old home, or the old country). “This evocation...when Yiddish-speaking
grandmothers...were less materialistic and vain than girls are today is essential to Hasidic
nostalgia for an idealized lost Judaism that is defined today by poverty, hardship, and
isolation” from outside influences (Fader, 130). Life in America may be more bountiful,
but the character traits of the hardened women in the European generations were more
refined and closer to the principles outlined in the Torah, according to this nostalgic view.
Interestingly, Hasidim themselves have created a nostalgic, romanticized version of life
in the old country, much like that which Buber has been accused of creating by his critics.
Fader describes a tension in the Hasidic spectrum of being “modern” and “with it”
versus being “too Hasidish.” On the one hand, extremely Hasidic women (those who
speak only Yiddish, cover their heads with scarves instead of wigs26
, and have little to no
secular education or awareness of the outside world) are admired for their piety, but their
total disengagement from the outside leads to an “inability to transform the secular world
in order to strengthen their communities” (Fader 172). Fader discovered that Hasidic
femininity is about being modest and yet fashionable, religious and yet knowledgeable
about the outside world. Because many of the men in the Hasidic culture learn Torah part
time or full time, the women must engage in work in order to provide an income, which
necessitates having a foot in both worlds, the Hasidish and the American. Hasidic women
attributed his spiritual greatness to the “bath of immersion” (52), and how Rabbi Pinhas of Koretz expounded upon the scriptures during the “intermediate days of the Feast of Tabernacles” (128). 26 According to Jewish law, married women must cover their hair. Many women will cover their hair with a sheitl (wig). There is an ongoing debate among Rabbinic scholars and the Jewish Orthodox public about which type of head covering is more modest, but the subjects of Fader’s work seem to believe that it is the scarf.
49
gauge femininity by how effectively they can “negotiate the contemporary secular
world to effectively transform it through a Jewish civilizing project” (Fader, 134).
Hasidic femininity is defined by how effectively women achieve grace and poise in this
delicate balance. While this elevation of the secular world indeed echoes a major tenet of
Buber’s perception of Hasidic life in elevating the mundane, this navigation between
secular and religious realms and the topic of women in general is one which is not so
clearly present in Buber’s text.
In her research about the Hasidic marriage-related rites of passage, Fader attended
a class for Orthodox soon-to-be brides, which contained many Hasidic students.27
Such a
class is conducted to teach women about the laws of “ritual purity” which regulate
intimacy between man and wife, along with many other general points about marriage for
young women who have heretofore had limited interaction with the opposite gender.
Fader found that physicality was described as a means of spiritual adornment and
religious duty. “Combining aesthetics, religiosity, and consumption, Hasidic women
explode the perceived limitations in the secular distinctions between the material and the
spiritual, the secular and religious, asceticism and sensuality” (Fader, 206). The women
are taught about the beauty and spirituality of intimacy between man and wife, and the
elevated spiritual status of a beautiful home. Modesty and good appearances are supposed
to be complementary, not contradictory. This synthesis between religious values and
material appearances (for example, a beautiful table with silver cutlery and fine china in
celebration of the Sabbath) echoes Buber’s writing about the Hasidic ideal of elevating
the mundane into the spiritual. Fader’s research confirms that among actual Hasidim, this
27
Fader was unable to secure a seat in Hasidic-women-only course, because some of the parents of the young women were concerned about the presence of someone from outside the community in the class. See pages 197 – 208 of Mitzvah Girls.
50
unification of seeming opposites (spiritual and physical) is really an essential part of the
philosophy and lifestyle of Hasidism.
In summary, Fader validates Buber’s extensive discussion of the elevation of the
mundane, which Buber more specifically discusses as finding the holy or messianic
future in the present. However, Fader’s linguistic findings about the use of exclusively
Hebrew-Yiddish terminology to communicate concepts and items moves Buber’s work
quite clearly into the role of a translation meant for an outside audience, since he
frequently translates almost every word into German (sparing “zaddik” and “hasid” of
transposition). Furthermore, Buber ignores the topic of religious stringency, navigation
between secular and religious realms, and women in general, especially since almost
every story (with a few exceptions28
) is about men. By focusing on male engagement
with religious service, learning, and prayer, Buber marginalizes the role that women play
in Hasidic life, which Fader discusses extensively in her research. Do these omissions
indicate that Buber has made a selective presentation of Hasidism which communicates
only the message of ecstatic joy and human wholeness that he wishes to bring to the
reader, while ignoring some of the realities of Hasidic life?
Jerome Mintz also conducted research in the Hasidic world, focusing in particular
on storytelling in his work Legends of the Hasidim: An Introduction to Hasidic Culture
and Oral Tradition in the New World (1968). In the opening pages, Mintz discusses the
challenge of analyzing a culture through its oral literature, especially when that literature
has been appropriated by “well-meaning but misguided editors” such as Buber (see
footnotes on page 2 of Mintz’s work). Mintz draws his study from real-life Hasidim,
28 For example, see the story “They Tell,” in the section about Rabbi Abraham the Angel (113). Buber relates how the wife of the Maggid of Mezritch travels through a snow storm to immerse in the mikveh.
51
gathering the tales in their “natural state” with paper, pen, and tape recorder to capture
stories in homes, stores, and ritual ceremonies (3).
Mintz tells us that for more than two hundred years, storytelling has flourished
among the Hasidim, first in Europe, and now in Israel and the United States. The Baal
Shem Tov disseminated his teachings through tales and parables, which set a precedent of
oral storytelling in Hasidism. “Like their teacher [before them], each Rebbe29
attracted a
store of wonder tales testifying to his profound powers” (4). Storytelling became part of
the Shabbos ritual, as men gathered for the third meal, at which the Rebbe would tell
stories of Hasidic Tzadikim (these are the zaddikim that Buber writes of). On the
yahrzeit30
of a Rebbe, the Hasidim would relate stories about the deceased Tzadik, along
with engaging in song, dance, and drink. Mintz found that storytelling has a ritual and
casual significance to Hasidism, as stories are told casually “in the moment” and also as
part of rituals, such as the Sabbath Third-Meal or a Melevah Malka,31
a fourth meal after
the close of the Sabbath. Mintz describes a more ritualized scene: “As in the past the
hasidim partake of a simple meal of rye bread, herring and onions, salt, fruit, potatoes,
and tea. Brandy, often homemade, is offered, and blessings are exchanged. The singing is
strong. The association with the Shabbes strengthens the sacred character of the
stortytelling” (4). Mintz sees a contrast between the literature of the Sabbath liturgy,
29 A Rebbe is the leader of a Hasidic court; many of the zaddikim that Buber wrote about were Rebbes, and the terms are often used interchangeably 30 The anniversary of a person’s death is an important personal calendrical day in Judaism. 31 Literally “Escorting the Queen”
52
which discusses prophets and kings32
, and the oral literature of the Melevah Malka, where
“merchants, peasants, Rebbes, and secret tsaddikim rub shoiulders” (5). Whereas the
narratives of the synagogue and religious texts are austere, the narratives of the Hasidic
story may contain a more common and varied cast of characters that is more relatable to
the common man. The fellowship described by Mintz which circles around Hasidic
storytelling certainly echoes Buber’s writing about Hasidic emphasis on sacred
community, while his discovery of tales told in casual conversational validates the
possibility that Buber posits of finding ecstatic joy and spiritual wholeness in everyday
life through the illustration of a Hasidic legend that relates to what is happening “in the
moment.”
Mintz believes there are several reasons why oral storytelling is still vibrantly
alive in Hasidic life: (1) oral tradition was a primary means of Talmudic, kabbalistic, and
Hasidic transmission of texts and ideas; (2) storytelling is entertainment in a culture
without theater or secular books; (3) Hasidim (according to Mintz) have a suspicion of
the printed word due to the interference of author’s personal whims and the breaking of
confidentiality. In fact, Mintz writes that there are even some Rebbes who discourage
their Hasidim from reading legends in printed books, in order to avoid interacting with
corrupted versions of a tale which had been carefully persevered in oral transmission.
Frequently the authenticity of a tale is fortified by reference to living witnesses (Mintz,
6).
Mintz sees twelve functions in the Hasidic Tale: (1) they serve as historical record
of Hasidic courts, (2) they record personal and family history, (3) they emphasize
32 Here Mintz is most likely referring to the weekly Torah reading (from the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses), which is accompanied by a “Haftorah” drawn from the Prophets.
53
appropriate social conduct, (4) validate a Rebbe’s power and righteousness, and the
special mission of the Jews, (5) portray the Rebbe as a spiritual protector, (6) help
individuals situate themselves in Hasidic society (7) emphasize the storyteller’s
connection to the Rebbe, (8) serve as guides of conduct, (9) provide entertainment (10)
ease the tension generated from rigors of ritualized religious life, (11) provide mystical
experience (12) and can actually even be spiritual vehicles for changing physical reality.
“Storytelling has been used to shape desired ends, and therefore can be conceived of as
the powerful, even magical, equivalent off action,” Mintz writes (8). Buber does not
touch on the transformational capacity of the tales to affect a new reality. For Buber, the
main function of the Hasidic tale is to communicate the Hasidic teaching of ecstatic joy
and the possibility for spiritual wholeness, which aligns with point eight on Mintz’s list
(that the legends serve as guides of conduct).
The tales therefore preserve a record of thoughts and attitudes of the time, which
are usually recorded in diaries and letters. For example, the tales may record a reaction of
the Hasidim to governmental decrees in Tzarist Russia, such as restrictions on living
space, military conscription, and discriminatory laws (Mintz, 11). The tales provide
“insights into the Hasidic worldview and into specific social attitudes” (Mintz, 13). While
some of the tales borrow from non-Jewish European storytelling tradition33
“the
overwhelming majority…appear to be new Hasidic creations based on actual experience
and observation” (ibid.). The storytelling tradition did not die out with the mass exodus of
Hasidim from Europe to New York. It is alive and well today, flowering with new stories
of miracles in diverse locations all over the world, and continuing to serve as a record of
the Hasidic worldview.
33 Mintz refers specifically to the “grateful dead” character type as an example.
54
A brief word about Mintz’s methodology would help us have some contrast to
Buber’s primarily textual assembly of his anthology. Mintz collected the tales through
interviews and by attending religious events. By analyzing the trends in the tales, he was
able to make inferences about the philosophy and culture, and develop a set of questions
to prompt interviewees to reveal more information. Mintz also turned to Dubnow,
Scholem, Buber, Shechter, and other scholars for textual background research on
Hasidism. Mintz’s interviews with Hasidim ranged from “highly structured” to “quite
casual” (19). He interviewed 150 Hasidim, although only fifty extensively, and a self-
admitted shortcoming to the study was the absence of women and the opportunity to view
childcare (two areas that Fader focused on specifically). Mintz also interviewed several
Rebbes, among them, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, with whom he met for several hours.
Mintz comments on how his own Jewishness played into the research project. “I
did not pretend to be an orthodox Jew,” he asserts, because feigning orthodoxy would
have posed some problems in the interview processes, especially regarding points of
observance he would be expected to know (19). The Hasidim he met with were eager to
extol the virtues of orthodoxy, attributing Mintz’s lack of awareness regarding religious
law to his secular upbringing. However, despite their discussion and debate, “it would be
an obvious deceit to pretend to commit oneself to a new and consuming way of life” (19).
Mintz writes that he was never wholly convinced to adopt the Hasidic lifestyle, and his
resistance yielded more discussion and material in the interviews. The Hasidim were
generally friendly and willing to talk to Mintz, and connect him with other Hasidim.
Mintz believes that this was in part due to their curiosity about his status as an outsider,
and yet, also as a fellow Jew. Mintz says that his collection of tales falls short of
55
informing the reader about Hasidic philosophy and culture, which is far beyond the scope
of his research: “I am acutely aware of the limitations of a single investigator,” he
concludes (21). Mintz’s self described reluctance to adopt the Hasidic lifestyle despite his
close engagement with Hasidim echoes Buber’s own aversion to “masquerading” as a
Hasidic Jew which he discusses in his personal essay “My Way to Hasidism.”
Mintz’s study also helps us understand the physical contexts of Hasidic life. In the
introduction to his book, Mintz discusses the origin of Hasidism, its migration to America
from Europe because of World War II, and its subsequent flowering in the New York
metropolitan area. His historical summary is punctuated with firsthand accounts from the
generation of Hasidim that grew up in Europe. One Hasid recounts the horrors of the
death camps, and how after the war (World War II) he met up with his Rebbe in Italy.
The Rebbe said he would be going to America, and offered to send the Hasid papers for
immigration, so that he could join the Rebbe in New York. “Somebody who cares about
me…not only spiritual, but physical,” the Hasid said of his Rebbe (Mintz, 36). Mintz’s
interviews found that the Rebbe is a caretaker of the Hasidim, not only spiritually, but
physically as well, which echoes Buber’s description of the zaddik figure as one who
cares for the hasidim and attends to their “big” and “little” concerns.
Mintz describes Hasidic life in some detail, which is useful for developing a more
rounded-out picture of what Buber describes, albeit what Mintz describes is in New
York34
instead of old-world Europe35
. However, Mintz’s descriptions are punctuated with
34 Mintz’s studies were conducted in the 1960s, and his book was published in 1968. For a more updated depiction of Hasidic New York, we can turn to Fader’s descriptions (2009). 35
While Buber’s anthologies of Hasidic folklore were published in different decades and read in different contexts (for example, before and after WWII), his storytelling still depict a particular group, place, and time (namely, the first six generations of Hasidic Jewry in Eastern Europe).
56
narratives by Hasidim who testify that the social structure of New York has many similar
features to the way life was in Europe. The Besmedresh (a building for the three daily
prayer services and a Talmudic study hall) is still “the hub of Hasidic social life…a place
of rest, meditation, conversation politicizing, children’s play, and storytelling” (Mintz,
48). The Rebbe is in charge of the Hasidic besmedrish, and designates authority to
gaboyim (beadles) and a rav (a rabbi for answering halachic questions). The Shabbes, or
the Sabbath, is a time set aside from the remaining workweek for prayer, study, and
various religious/social activities, among which are “sitting at the Rebbe’s
table…elaborate family meals…and storytelling” (Mintz 50). Businesses are closed, and
any activity bearing any semblance to work is restricted. Many of the men wear long
black silk kaftans (today many are made from polyester), some wear white stockings, and
married men may wear round fur hats (streimel). The men have prepared for the Sabbath
by immersing in a mikveh (which Buber refers to as the “ritual bath”), although many
Hasidic men immerse in the mikveh ever morning. “Until the close of the Shabbes, when
there is a sense of physical release from the special obligations and the special joys, the
courts are sacred communities” (Mintz, 51). The “Shabbes” is regarded as a pleasure that
surpasses all pleasures enjoyed by “alien society” (ibid). The elaborate meals,
storytelling, learning, and sacred atmosphere are blended together to create an intense and
spiritual experience. The “spiritual wholeness” and “ecstatic joy” of the Sabbath
experience is expected and permanent in nature (since the Shabbes occurs on a weekly
basis), and communal (such as the elaborate meals and public gatherings of prayer), but
Hasidic storytelling on the Sabbath—both casual and ritualized—provides inspiration for
the individual Hasidim to find this ecstatic joy and spiritual wholeness during the week,
57
through illustrations that imbue life moments with sacred meaning. When their lives are
constantly punctuated by the discovery the holy within the mundane, then the entire week
can become as sacred in nature as the Sabbath day, and they are able to live out the
Hasidic reality that Buber proposes: a life of ecstatic joy and spiritual wholeness.
Mintz discusses several other facets of Hasidic life, such as the importance placed
on learning. While in the early days of the movement, the simple man was cherished, and
his worthiness and ability to connect to G-d upheld despite his ignorance, today Talmudic
study is held in high regard. In fact, “the preconditions for status in the Hasidic
community are piety and Talmudic learning” (Mintz, 52). Mathematics, astronomy,
geometry, medicine, ethics, and even humorous anecdotes are all found within the
Talmud, and “penetrating the meanings of Talmudic and kabbalistic writings is closely
associated with imaginative life,” that is, higher levels of learning can reshape events,
much in the same way as storytelling is believed to do so (Mintz, 52). However, even
though most men learn Torah-related texts for several hours a day, erudition still does not
supplant piety in importance in the Hasidic schema. Other factors of status include Yihus
(lineage), and tzedakah, or charity (especially charity accompanied by financial success).
Most noticeably occupation does not play a particular role in social standing. “A Hasid
does not have a career; he is concerned simply with earning a living in a way which will
not interfere with his religious duties” (Mintz, 57). At the time of Mintz’s writing, many
of his interviewees were skilled workers in industry, such as diamond-cutters, machinists,
watchmakers, carpenters, and other skilled trades. Mintz writes that like many ethnic
immigrant groups, the occupations of Hasidim have shifted over time. Secular education
is not held in high regard, and career advancement is not particularly regarded as
58
important. This finding about the lack of career-related emphasis for men meshes well
with Fader’s research, where many Hasidic women engaged with the secular workforce
world, at times even obtaining advanced degrees, so that their sons and husbands could
be devoted full time to religious pursuits such as Talmudic study.
Because religious life is so costly and the standard of living is so much higher
than that in Europe, many Hasidim have reduced their time learning and praying in favor
of the necessity of work. For example, due to dietary restrictions against mixing dairy and
meat products, two sets of dishes and cutlery are required, and two sets of kitchen
appliances are preferred; in another example, Hasidim will only send their children to
private religious schools. The “New World’s demand for continual effort and for a higher
standard of living” have negatively impacted religious life along with the temptations of
secular life in the city (Mintz, 62). The bounteous and free nature of America is double-
edged sword. On the one hand, it has allowed the Hasidim to pursue and live their way of
life, free of the persecution they faced in Europe. On the other hand, as one Hasid attests,
“the freedom is very hard on us” (Mintz, 61). There is less time for learning and praying,
and more demands for money to support large, religious families, under the pressures of
low pay and little secular education. This tension between the Hasidic way and the
demands of modern life, gender related stressors (sexuality, marriage, divorce) inter-court
strife (especially over the political issue of the state of Israel) are not discussed in Buber’s
work, whereas Mintz uncovers these concerns through interviews with Hasidism, relating
how they are key issues in today’s (American) Hasidic world.
Whereas Buber describes Hasidism in philosophical terms, Mintz’s approach is
more anthropological in that he discusses court life, marriage, weddings, learning, youth
59
and childhood, and other various features of the Hasidic life as it is actually lived in New
York. Storytelling is an integral part of the Hasidic life, according to Mintz, which echoes
Buber’s assertion that the Hasidic way is best communicated through the tale; however,
Buber’s anthology is someone static, since it is locked in the 18th
and 19th
centuries.
Mintz’s research helps us understand how Hasidism (and Hasidic storytelling) continued
to develop through the 1960s, and also the role that storytelling plays in Hasidic society
through his description of the context (for example, the Sabbath day meals, the Rebbe’s
table, and the Besmedresh).36
Mintz also clarifies the role of the Rebbe figure. He directs the affairs of the
Hasidic court, and “also serves as a mediator between his followers and G-d,” which
validates Buber’s writing on the zaddik (Mintz, 89). His prayer, piety, and public
speeches are directed towards connecting his followers to G-d; “his power and authority
have their roots in his intense piety, in his special relationship to G-d, and his yihus
[lineage],” unlike a normative Orthodox Rabbi, who is primarily qualified to answer
questions of halacha based on ordination. The Rebbe “functions in the uncertain areas of
life rather than in the clearly defined domain of the law” (Mintz 89). This assessment
would agree with Buber’s introduction, which says nothing about the Rebbe’s guidance
in terms of fulfilling Torah law, but rather as a spiritual guide—in fact, Buber likewise
stresses the importance of the Rebbe in making decisions through uncertain areas of life.
The Hasidim, according to Mintz, would describe the Rebbe as “the perfect righteous
man” and that he fulfills the dictates of the Torah with “zeal and insight” (90). Moreover,
Mintz quotes one Hasid as explaining that the essence of a Rebbe is that “he worships G-
36 Later in the paper, we will examine Hasidic storytelling today through an interview, my own personal experience, and digital contexts such as the internet and video.
60
d every second of the day with all his heart and soul” (90). This superhuman nature will
be echoed in the writings of Gedalyah Nigal which we will turn to after Mintz’s work,
but it conflicts with the humanist emphasis of Buber’s introduction, which emphasizes
that the zaddik is one who has perfected the process of becoming human—in fact, Buber
de-emphasizes their righteous nature.
The Rebbe’s charisma and spiritual guidance protects the Hasidim from
infertility, poverty, sickness, and other ills. Furthermore, “the tales preserve not only the
wonders performed but also the Rebbe’s distinguishing personal characteristics and his
philosophical point of view” (ibid). Some examples of different distinguished personality
traits include the intellectualism of the Alter Rebbe (Rabbi Shneur Zalman) the loving
humanism of the Berdichever (Rabbi Levi Yitzchok), the court splendor of the Rizhyner
(Rabbi Israel Friedman), and the piety of the Breslever (Rabbi Nachman), to name a few.
However, despite the centrality of the Rebbe figure, the tales are also filled with a whole
spectrum of socio-economic and spiritual standing, such as rabbis, ritual slaughterers,
coachmen, wealthy businessmen, peasants, widows, secret saints, open sinners, Talmudic
scholars, Emperors, government officials, priests, skeptical misnagdim (opponents to
Hasidism) and many others. The tales are usually told from the perspective of the
common man (Mintz, 10). This substantiates Buber’s claim that a large component of
Hasidism is the interaction between the zaddik and his hasidim, and the zaddik and the
common man.
Mintz describes four occasions on the Sabbath when the Rebbe is with his
Hasidism for communal meal and drink: the Friday night meal, the Saturday lunch meal,
the third meal at dusk, and the Melevah Malka (escorting of the queen), a fourth meal
61
held after the Sabbath. “The meals are always enlivened by song and often by dance as
well” (Mintz, 96). The Rebbe may give over a kabbalistic discourse on the weekly Torah
reading, and following the meal, casual discussion around the table can range from the
affairs of the day to Talmudic debate. At the third meal, the Rebbe may deliver a
lengthier mystical discourse, “an intricate pattern of thoughts which unites the sayings of
the past with the problems of the present” (Mintz, 98). Often the kabbalistic explanation
transitions into words which strengthen the resolve of the Hasidim, his followers, to
continue living the Hasidic lifestyle, and will conclude with fervent prayers for the arrival
of the Messiah. Each Hasid would say that the Rebbe is speaking directly to him, and
there are innumerable accounts that testify to this perception of direct personal
connection in the midst of a larger group, “and that was because he [the Rebbe]
understood the people” one Hasid explains (99). Customs vary among the Hasidic courts
as to the number of meals the Rebbe participates in publically, and if he shares a teaching
at those meals.
Mintz explains the relationship between the Rebbbe and his Hasidim. Many times
a Hasid will follow the Rebbe of his parents, although sometimes a Hasid will seek a new
Rebbe. Many people are drawn to Hasidism because of the intimate relationship between
the Rebbe and his disciples. While the Rebbe takes care of his Hasidim, in moments of
need, the Hasidim will take care of the Rebbe (here Mintz cites the example of the
Hasidim taking care of the elderly Stoliner Rebbe in the last years of his life). Many
stories discuss the strong bond between the Hasidim and their Rebbe, who, when it is
called for, will live with enormous self sacrifice in order to protect his Hasidim. The
Rebbe figure is known to appear in the dreams of the Hasidim, and guide and protect
62
them in moments of physical and/or spiritual danger. During the Sabbath and holidays the
Hasidim will make a special point to visit the Rebbe and hear his teachings, and
occasionally the Rebbe will travel to see his Hasidim in a distant place. “In general, the
Rebbe is called on to give advice when the issue is uncertain” Mintz explains,
highlighting the Rebbe’s role not so much as an arbitrator in Jewish law, but as a personal
guide for the Hasidim through many of life’s challenges (114).
Buber had asserted that Hasidim was a rejection of the messianic actualization as
found in one individual, in favor of the democratic seizure of the messianic present,
available for all mankind. However, Mintz’s findings seem to contradict this conclusion,
since he writes that the arrival of a messianic era, facilitated by one individual, is indeed
an integral part of Hasidic belief. In “The Rebbe’s Role in History” (92-95) Mintz
discusses the Hasidim’s equation of the Rebbe to the Messiah figure. The Rebbe may be
a reincarnation of a previous Tzadik or biblical figure. “To the Rebbe falls the
guardianship of all Israel” (Mintz, 93). The Rebbe may have an active role in history,
such as setting aside decrees from the Tsar; above all he spearheads the ongoing spiritual
battle of the Jewish people to bring the era of the messiah. The Lubliner and the
Rimanover Rebbe took opposing sides over the Napoleonic war, each one attempting to
guide the course of history through kabbalistic means in hope that this was the final great
battle before the arrival of the Messiah; Israeli military success in the Sinai war is
attributed to the spiritual efforts of the Belzer Rebbe; the halting of Rommel’s advance
through North Africa is attributed to the Hushatner Rebbe. The Rebbe so fervently hopes
for the arrival of the Messiah that he may keep a walking stick handy, or refuse to enter
paradise until the messiah arrives. Perhaps the Rebbe himself may even be the Messiah,
63
and if the generation is worthy, he will reveal himself (this has been said about the
Stoliner Rebbe and the Lubavitcher Rebbe). Contrary to Buber’s interpretation, the
expectation of the messianic era, and the arrival of a singular messianic figure, is very
much a part of Hasidic Judaism according to Mintz, and a topic of storytelling.
For additional insight into how the Rebbe-zaddik figure interfaces with Hasidic
folklore, I found it helpful to turn to the writing of Israeli scholar Gedalyah Nigal, who
highlights some of the traits of the tsadik character in Hasidic folklore. “In the Hasidic
story, the tsadik is gifted with superhuman qualities that raise him to the level of prophet”
(Nigal, 77). Nigal writes that the Tsadik had spiritual vision unbound by space and time,
out-of-body experiences of ascending to upper worlds (aliyot neshamot), and a
miraculous shortening of vast geographic distances during travel (kafitzas haderech). The
Baal Shem Tov was gifted with such abilities, but the succeeding generations did not
have the power of kafitzas haderech attributed to them as often, which echoes Buber’s
assertion that the spiritual prowess in succeeding generations went on decline.
According to Nigal, many stories discuss the giving of a pidyon hanefesh
(redemption for the soul), money handed over to the Tsadik so that he will effect some
healing or blessing, and kvitlach (letters of petition) asking for blessings, particularly in
the areas of children, life, and income). Nigal views these exchanges (the presentation of
pidyon hanefesh and kvitelach) as the primary means of connection between the Tsadik
and his followers, highlighting the kabbalistic prowess of the Tsadik to effect changes in
reality via supernatural means.
Stories often discuss the misnagdim, or opponents of Hasidism, who were
particularly irked by halachic differences, such as the Hasidic choice of praying with the
64
Sephardic37
rite, or the differences of opinion regarding shechita (ritual slaughter of
livestock for consumption). Many stories recount how the opponents became adherents
because of an interaction with the Tsadik, for example, the story of a misnagid teacher,
who struggled to understand an interpretation by the Tosafists38
of a particular Talmudic
passage until it was explained to him in a dream by the Baal Shem Tov himself. The
teacher dismissed the incident, until the Baal Shem Tov invited him to a third meal of the
Sabbath and repeated the teaching in person, upon which the teacher became a devoted
disciple. Initially the scholarly opponents believe the Tsadik to be an ignoramus, but
subsequently they are captured and converted to the Hasidic way once the Tsadik reveals
his scholarship and superhuman vision.
Nigal discusses how life topics such as marriage, death, birth, illness, and others
are depicted in Hasidic folklore. He writes in her introduction that “no social or religious
movement in the entire course of Jewish history has engaged so intensively in storytelling
as hasidism” and that the Hasidic storytelling genre continues today (1). He believes the
genre is a literary innovation in Jewish texts, because for the first time, the literature
focused on exemplary individuals and their followers. The principal element of the story
is the ability of the Tsadik to channel divine energy, mediate heavenly decrees, and help
the simple folk who followed the Hasidic path; Nigal does not mention anything about
“ecstatic joy” that Buber proposes as the core of Hasidic life (ibid). The tale has a
“sanctified status” that has helped it survive through two centuries with little variation in
content and form. Nigal believes the tale has seven typical features: (1) wondrous acts of
the tsadikim are featured; (2) other Hasidim are usually secondary characters; (3) the
37
As opposed to the Ashkenazi rite used by most European Jews 38 Talmudic scholars of Medieval France
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tsadik resolves the problem of an individual who has approached him for help; (4)
landscape and nature are absent in these stores; (5) Jewish and non-Jewish motifs are
used; (6) a focus on the simple person is prevalent (7) the hidden tsadik is a common
theme. Through Nigal’s writing we see that the Rebbe/Tsadik figure is the central
character of the tales.
Nigal believes that there are five factors which contributed to the emergence of
the Hasidic tale: (1) Hasidism used parables and stories as a means of communicating
complex ideas to ordinary, non-scholarly people; (2) Hasidism promotes the idea that G-d
can be worshiped through the mundane, such as normal conversation; (3) there is a
universal human desire to relate past events and viewpoints; (4) a tradition of relating
tales about miracle workers already existed in Judaism; (5) there is an influence of
narrative material from Jewish and non-Jewish sources. However, Nigal concludes that
the most important function in the emergence of the Hasidic tale was the imperative to
defend and promote the Hasidic movement, especially because Hasidism was so heavily
criticized during its nascent years. The wondrous acts of the Tsadik defend him from the
criticism leveled by misnagdim (opponents) about his purported lack of scholarship. This
defense was not directed only towards opponents, but also inwardly towards Hasidim, to
strengthen their resolve and investment in the movement. Thus we see that for Nigal,
both the content and function of Hasidic storytelling circle around the Tsadik figure.
However, Nigal does not believe that Hasidic storytelling merely served the
apologetic function of defending the Hasidic movement and promoting the prowess of a
particular Rebbe; it also communicated Hasidic ideals. The listeners did not receive “an
orderly Hasidic teaching, such as those set out in the theoretical and exegetical Hasidic
66
literature; rather, [the Hasidic tale] teachers Hasidic ethical values by presenting
exemplary behavior” (Nigal, 75). The poor, ignorant, and downtrodden could finally
access the teachings of Judaism that were previously denied them due to illiteracy,
because “the Hasidic storytelling genre translated the practical portion of hasidic
teachings into the language of the simple folk” (ibid). Nigal concludes that on the whole,
the stories are optimistic, providing hope that the problems of daily life could be solved
by exemplary individuals. This echoes Buber’s opinion that the Hasidic tale
communicated values by describing the anecdotes of the zaddik’s life, rather than
communicating those same values through texts on Hasidic philosophy. Even though
Nigal does not mirror Buber’s exact language of “ecstatic joy,” he nonetheless suggests
that the Hasidic tale offers the common folk the possibility of transcending mundane life.
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CHAPTER V
LAW AND STORYTELLING IN HASIDISM
I have noted that Buber does not focus on the fulfillment of Jewish Law in his
introduction to the Tales, although he does address it in passing by referring to the zaddik
as a living embodiment of the law. However, there is no elaboration on the “Law” or the
“Torah” and what these concepts might imply on a daily basis. On the other hand, Mintz
writes that “an intimate relationship exists between Hasidic tale and Hasidic law, ritual,
social structure, and daily life,” although he also validates Buber’s poetic license by
writing “most of the tales included here are the result of the interaction of imagination
and experience” (9). We might ask: if the Hasidim themselves relate tales in a way that
combines reality with personal worldview, how can we deny Buber the privilege of
retelling the tales in his own style? And yet, at the same time, Mintz (and Fader) are very
clear that religious stringency in the fulfillment of Jewish law is an important feature of
the Hasidic landscape, which Buber does not dwell on more than in passing.
Mintz highlights the primacy of religious law in Hasidic life, or Yiddishkeit
(Jewish practice). According to Mintz, the bare minimum level of observance in
Orthodox Judaism is “keeping the Shabbes and holidays, attending prayer services,
putting on tefillin39
, eating only kosher food, and maintaining the purity of the home”
with attendance of women at the mikveh to reestablish marital intimacy following their
monthly cycle (57). Outward signs include a head covering at all times, a fringed
undershirt, and a mezuzah on the doorposts of the home. Among Hasidism, additional
39
Small black boxes containing biblical passages, one worn on the left bicep, the other on the forehead, during the morning prayer service
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physical identifiers often include a beard and payos40
, long coats, and black hats. To trade
ritual observation for modern convenience (such as working on the Sabbath) is not
negotiable, although the outward signs do fall along a spectrum (for example, Chabad
Hasidim, dressed in a black fedora and suit jacket, may appear more modern than the
long-coated, streimel wearing Hasid on the Sabbath).
The life of a Hasid is guided by the 613 mitzvoth (commandments) of the Torah
and all their corollaries, as expressed in Jewish law. “To Orthodox Jewry the
commandments and their exegesis represent the complete code of ethical and ritual
conduct decreed by God and accepted by the Jews” (Mintz, 123). Mintz cites scholars41
who actually place the emphasis of Hasidism not on mysticism, but on scrupulous
observance of the commandments (ibid). Mintz believes that the “mitzvehs” have
magical, mystical, and psychological components. Because the body, soul, cosmos, and
Torah are all interconnected in Hasidic philosophy, many of the tales express “the
potential of the mitzves for sustaining life, for healing, and for offering hope of eternal
salvation” (Mintz, 124). On the other hand, failure to uphold the mitzvoth can result in
misfortune and illness. However, Mintz urges us not to interpret the Hasidic worldview
as one of magical causality, for in fact “Hasidic belief and tradition are multifaceted and
there are countless explanatory avenues” to explain the circumstances of the world (131).
The connection of mitzvehs to life and success, and a lack of observance to danger and
failure, highlight the importance of Jewish law in Hasidic storytelling, and the importance
of halacha among Hasidic Jewry—something that is not a central focus to Buber’s text.
40 Hair on the side of the head which is grown long, in contrast to the other head on the hair, which is cut short. This is done to magnify and beautify the commandment not to cut the corners of the beard, among other, more kabbalistic reasons. 41 Lazar Gulkowitsch and Max Lohr
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Many Jewish texts such as the Torah and the Talmud contain two threads, one
narrative (aggadic) and the other legal (halachic). While I do not suggest that Buber’s
anthology of Hasidic legends conform to this formula, I would suggest that even the
purely narrative texts read (or told over) within the context of Hasidism were digested by
a society actively observing the religious statues of Orthodox Judaism—as in the
examples provided by Mintz of Hasidic Jewish men sitting around the table of the Rebbe,
observing one of the Sabbath rituals. Therefore, within the context of the Hasidic
community, even stories of zaddikm serve a didactic purpose with a tangible directive to
be fulfilled in the observance of halacha.42
This has a precedent in classical Jewish texts:
if one looks through the Talmud, one will find that stories are often used to illustrate the
practical ramifications of some legal debate which has raged on through the previous
pages.
I found in the writings of Haim Nahman Bialik (1873 -1934) an exploration of the
interplay between these two threads (narrative and legal), and the nature of their mutual
support in completing a Jewish text in his article “Halacha and Aggadah” (1944,
reprinted in 2000). Buber had, in his introduction, mentioned joy, ecstasy, intensity,
devotion, and connection to G-d, but where was any reference to fulfilling these
generalities through something concrete? The Tales themselves gave no practical
guidance in this matter, as they allow the reader a brief glimpse into the world of pious
and righteous supermen, with no instruction on how to emulate their incredible fortitude
and willpower for finding the messianic future in the present.
42 As an example of this, later I will relate a story I heard of a Jew in the concentration camp, who exhibited enormous self-sacrifice to fulfill the commandment of lighting a chanukiah.
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Halacha (from the Hebrew word lalechet, meaning to walk) refers to Jewish Law.
It covers all areas of life, with categories diverse as diet, commerce, marriage, and
medicine. Originating in the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and
Deuteronomy), Jewish Law was expanding and clarified in the Talmud, and later by legal
codifiers such as Maimonides43
and Rabbi Yosef Caro44
. Aggadita (or Agadah) are the
narratives contained in the Talmud and its counterpart, the Midrash45
. Aggadita contains
a large spectrum of material, which includes stories that fill in gaps in the biblical
narrative, wonder tales of traveling Rabbis (some reminiscent of the Arabian Nights),
allegorical narratives, anecdotes germane to the legal discussion of the Talmud, jokes,
astrology, and medicine—in short, a wide range of narrative topics.
According to Haim Bialik, Halacha and Agadah are like ice and water, two
expressions of the same element, and yet, the relationship is more than one of symbiosis.
“Halacha is the crystallization, the ultimate and inevitable quintessence of Agadah;
Agadah is the context of Halacha” (Bialik, 46). The stories are needed to provide a
contextual example for the law, but the meaning of the story is only fully expressed
through the law itself. Halacha generates agadah, and agadah generates halacha; the two
are not separate entities in a hierarchical order, but rather, are equal partners in an
engaged, symbiotic relationship.
43 Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon (1135-1204) wrote a full compendium of Jewish called the Mishneh Torah. See “Codification of the Law” (by M. Elon) from the Encyclopedia Judaica, cited in the bibliography. 44 (1488-1575) Author of the Shulchan Aruch (literally “The Set Table”) a definitive four-part text of Jewish Law. See “Shulhan Arukh” (by L. Rabinowitz) in the Encyclopedia Judaica, cited in the bibliography. 45 There are many Midrashic works throughout Jewish history, which are replete with multiple-layered narratives.
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Bialik compares halacha to art, and writes that unlike other forms of artistic
expression, which are proverbially “set in stone,” Halacha is organic and ever evolving.
The Mishna was built upon, expanded, and refined by the Talmud, which in turn was
expanded and refined by the layers of commentary from Rashi, which was further
expanded by the French Tosafists, which was further expanded the commentaries of the
Shulchan Aruch (the Code of Jewish Law). I would add to Bialik’s description and
suggest that Halacha is almost like the process of breathing in its expansions and
contractions; one could argue that Jewish ritual law is not “dead,” “static,” or “closed,”
but rather alive, moving, and open. The Talmud expanded the Mishna, but the Shulchan
Aruch contracted the Talmud, only to be further expanded in the commentaries such as
the Magen Avraham and Turei Zahav46
. Without this living, breathing component of
Halacha, I would argue that the Aggadic component ceases to lose its meaning and
vitality, because the stories are separated from the living, organic thread of Jewish
discussion and practical application.
Bialk uses the Sabbath as an example to illustrate how both Halacha and agadah
are integral components in the formation of a Jewish concept (in this case, the day of
rest). Liturgy of the Sabbath is replete with the poetic imagery of the bride (aggadic
material), and yet there is also the immense volume of legal literature (314 pages of the
Talmudic tractate Shabbos, and 210 pages of tractate Eruvin, both of which discuss the
halachic observance of the Sabbath). Bialik’s assessment is that “the result of all this
tiresome work of halacha is a day which is wholly aggadah” (53). Thus, in this example
of the interplay between aggadic and halachic material relating to Shabbos, Bialik reads
46 Two commentaries that are standard features of printed editions of the Shulchan Aruch. See the “Shulhan Arukh” (by M. Elon) in the Encyclopedia Judaica, cited in the bibliography.
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the (aggadic) narrative liturgy as the culmination of the legal (halachic) foundation,
without which it could not stand.
A kernel of halacha contains a whole tree of aggadic material. To illustrate,
Bialik cites a halacha discussing which texts may be saved from a burning building on
the Sabbath (generally it is prohibited to carry items from the private domain into the
public domain on the Sabbath, but this law can be suspended if holy writings need to be
saved from fire). The Mishnaic text references a debate as to whether only Hebrew
scriptures may be saved from the fire, or if holy texts in the vernacular may be saved as
well. Bialik portrays this halacha as a “seed” containing the whole “tree” of aggadic
narrative alluding to the great language debate which runs throughout Jewish history, the
struggle and tension to maintain national identity through diverse languages and exile.
Bialik asks if we cannot picture the tragedy of the seventy sages imprisoned by King
Ptolemy until they translated the sacred text from Hebrew into Greek; are we able to
envision the Jewish nation rushing to save its literary treasure (the Oral
Law/Mishnah/Talmud) from the fires of the Babylonian, Greek, and Roman oppressors,
who destroyed the Temple and Razed Jerusalem to the ground? Cannot we not see in our
mind’s eye the struggle of the Rabbis to maintain transmission of the Oral law from one
generation to the next; can we not visualize Rabbi Yehuda ben Bava blocking the
mountain pass, as he is pierced by the spears of the Roman Legion until blood runs from
his body like a sieve, while the five Rabbinic students he had just ordained in secret flee
(including Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, to whom the Zohar is attributed according to
Orthodox Judaism)? Cannot one picture all the dramas and debates that played out over
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this great issue of language, so pithily summarized in a straightforward halacha regarding
which texts may be saved from the flames on the Sabbath (Bialik, 56-63)?
Not only does the halacha contain the germ of aggadic material, but aggadah may
also be used to form halachic conclusions. To illustrate this point, Bialik uses a halacha
which discusses the nature and permissibility of carrying weapons on the Sabbath, and
how the opinion of the sages against the permissibility of carrying weaponry is drawn
from the verse in Isaiah that “they shall beat their swords into plowshares” (Isaiah 2:4) In
this case, we see that a halachic conclusion is drawn from the poetry of the prophets
(specifically, aggadic material regarding the messianic future).
Halacha itself is also literature, Bialik points out, citing several Mishnaic texts
from a range of topics: “two men take hold of a shawl,” “when the potter puts down his
pots,” and “when the man puts down his cask” (74). The halachic text is full of narrative
illustrations in order to convey a practical illustration of the law. Halacha itself contains
and depends on narrative. The halacha is a veritable “kaleidoscope of pictures” depicting
the farms, markets, the Temple, and all aspects of life in ancient Israel. In the Talmud,
when the chain of transmission did not fully carry down the fine points and clarifications
of the subject matter, the halacha was often reconstructed from daily life, as the Rabbis
would piece together an understanding of the law based on the long established customs
of the people. Bialik wonders why we cannot do the inverse, and reconstruct life from
halacha. He proposes that we are waiting for the “redeeming hand” to revitalize the
mishnaic law into living poetry. The possibility of finding the messianic future (albeit in
the present) which Buber expresses in aggadic material, Bialik proposes that we can find
in halacha.
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Each age has its own halacha and aggadah, and according to Bialik, the two
strains are necessary components in Jewish literature. Aggadah without halacha means
wandering aimlessly without a destination. “Aggadah that does not bring Halacha in its
train is ineffective,” Bialik concludes (81). He writes further that “such a man wants to
pluck the flower, but cares nothing for the fruit” (82). According to Bialik’s theory, one
could ask: what is the “destination” of Buber’s anthology, which is all aggadic, and
contains no reference to halacha?
It would seem that Buber is not interested in the destination achieved through the
union of halacha and aggadah; rather Buber is interested in the way his compilation of
aggadic material can help the reader find the messianic, utopian joy in the present. I
would suggest that Buber may have felt that halacha would confine the tales to the
Hasidic realm and rendered them inaccessible to general readership; in order to
universalize his storytelling, Buber has left behind the halachic element, and presented
only the aggadic, which effectively removes the tales from their Hasidic soil. Hence, a
Hasidic Jew such as myself who reads the tales, may feel as if they are “missing
something,” but a non Hasidic reader who approaches the text will find them more
accessible, and that is presumably what Buber wishes to achieve by his very act of
translation47
—but we must ask if the cost of improved accessibility is a decrease in
authenticity as it relates to the connection between Law and storytelling in Hasidic life.
Bialik’s assessment is that the legal and narrative strains are components that
complete and even create the other, and that one without the other creates a literature that
is incomplete. Indeed, there are classical Jewish texts which are anthologies geared
47
See Buber’s comment in the Foreword to Hasidism: “I consider Hasidic truth vitally important for Jews, Christians, and others, and at this particular hour more important than ever before” (foreword).
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towards aggadic material exclusively, (such as the Ein Yaakov, or the Midrash Rabbah)
and there are also compilations of exclusively halachic material48
(the Mishneh Torah,
the Arba Turim, Shulchan Aruch, etc.). However, these anthologies would still draw on
the other thread for illustration or clarification. Moreover, I would argue that either type
of anthology (legal or narrative) would still be within the greater context of both halacha
and aggadah, because until the Enlightenment (or Haskalah) it would be written for an
observant audience that lived (or attempted to live) a life rounded out by both strains
(legal and narrative), according to the Torah.
Admittedly, Buber’s frequent reference to Jewish ritual obligations (such as the
mikveh, the third meal of Shabbat, and daily prayers, just to name a few) could be
construed as a type of halachic material. However, the quick references lack any kind of
explanation, even more so because they are totally transposed out of Hebrew and into
German, leaving uninformed readers with a hazy-at-best picture of the deeper meaning
and/or practical ramifications of “The Festival of the Rejoicing of the Law,” or “the Feast
of Tabernacles,” and so on. I believe that in Buber’s unexplained references to Jewish
rituals can obscure a clear understanding of the story instead of deepening our
understanding of the Hasidic life, because they remove a key component of the content,
namely, the halachic observance that is a critical component to Hasidic life.
Bialik’s essay illustrated the complementary nature of halachic and aggadic
strains in Jewish literature, and even asserted the necessity of both in providing guidance
toward the national destiny. Samuel J. Levine takes the interplay of legal and storytelling
threads beyond the page and explained how both are necessary for the formation of an
accurate and complete cultural perception. In his article “Halacha and Aggada:
48 See “Codification of Law” in Encyclopedia Judaica
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Translating Robert Cover’s Nomos and Narrative” (1998) Samuel J. Levine explores the
concept of Nomos (legal framework that creates societal norms) and Narrative (legal
storytelling) in American Law, and how the interplay between the two forms draws
precedence from the interplay between aggadah and halacha in Judaism. Levine cites the
opinion of David Stern, who writes that Aggadah does not mean just stories, but also
“extra biblical legends and tales about the rabbis to snippets of pop folklore and fully
elaborated homilies” (Levine, 486). In other words, the aggada is not so much a
classification of narrative form, but rather about conveying national, cultural, societal
attitudes. However, these cultural and societal norms cannot be conveyed by the aggadic
narrative alone; nomos is also required.
According to Levine, the Torah as a whole provides a nomos for ancient Israel by
laying out the laws and customs, while the aggadic element injects meaning into the
commands. Even the narrative elements of Genesis are illustrations of the laws regarding
primogeniture (i.e. the stories of Jacob and Esav, Isaac and Ishmael struggling for the
birthright). However, while Genesis is almost entirely narrative, the other four books of
the Torah (Exodus through Deuteronomy) are nomos; that is, they outline 613 principles
by which the Jewish nation is commanded to live.
Levine explains that even the aggadic-narrative material is meant to illustrate a
nomos-halachic component. He cites the commentary of the Medieval Rabbi-Scholar
Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchak Alfasi), whose commentary on the opening verse of the
creation story explains the legal precedents set by the narrative.49
The Ramban (Rabbi
Moses ben Nahman, commonly known as Nachmanides) further develops this theme by
49
One main point of Rashi’s commentary on this verse is the rulership of G-d over the whole world, and His ability to assign ownership of the land of Israel to whoever He chooses, in this case, the Jews.
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illustrating that the narrative material is meant to convey the concept of reward and
punishment, a fundamental nomos for the Jewish nation50
. Thus, Levine points out that
Rashi and Ramban (and subsequent super-commentaries) show the reader how the
narrative text (aggadic element) illustrates the importance of nomos (halachic element).
Levine concludes that aggadic material can also inform us of the halacha, and the true
task of the Rabbinic scholar is to discern the nomos behind the narrative, and become
partner with G-d in transforming chaos into a beautiful, organized reality.
The Talmud is perhaps the best illustration of how nomos and narrative
intertwine. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (author of many books on Jewish Chasidic-Chabad
philosophy and translator of the Talmud), states that the Talmud is “a conglomerate of
law, legend, and philosophy, a blend of unique logic and shrewd pragmatism, of history
and science, logic and humor...the repository of thousands of years of Jewish wisdom”
(Levine, 492). According to Rabbi Steinsaltz, around one quarter of the Talmud’s sixty-
three volumes is comprised of aggadic material. The Talmud shows us that extensive
legal discussion comes with extensive use of aggadic narrative material, which is
presented in order to make the legal component more digestible to those studying the
texts. Levine cites the “Oven of Akhnai” narrative, a story of how Rabbi Eliezer’s
opinion of a legal matter is backed by a heavenly voice, only for the dissenting Rabbis to
assert that the rendering of legal decisions is not left in heaven, but given over to the
decision-making process of the rabbis. The story of rabbis debating a law teaches us that
the application of nomos is left in the hands of the human court; it also shows us how a
tangible halachic concept is communicated through aggadic/narrative material (namely,
50
The narratives of the Tree of Good and Evil, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, etc, are all meant to communicate this concept of reward and punishment through their illustration of reward and punishment.
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the legal precedent that a human court may interpret, explain, and apply the nomos of the
Torah). Levine also cites the commandment of the New Moon51
to illustrate how the
implementation and development of the Torah’s legal system is in human hands, since
the lunar calendar could only be calculated by a complex system of witnesses, cross-
examinations, and astronomical calculations made by the Jewish court.
The nomos-narrative thread in Jewish Literature continues with the Mishneh
Torah. The Mishneh Torah52
(written by the Rambam, or Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, also
known as Maimonides) is a comprehensive voluminous work of legal conclusions for
everyday life, but Levine shows how on occasion, aggadic material is used to emphasize
the seriousness of the law, providing an example with G-d’s biblical assertion to defend
widows and orphans, meant to emphasize the gravity around the issue of legal
guardianship (Levine, 497). What Levine is expressing here, is that law alone is not
enough to carry the point: narrative is needed as well. Thus, according to Levine, aggadic
material is a means of conveying halachic precedent, while according to Bialik, the two
threads complement and inform each other. Despite the subtle difference, both
unequivocally state the importance of both narrative and nomos in Jewish literature.
According to the philosophy of Bialik and Levine, one could say that Buber’s text is thus
missing a crucial component common to many works of Jewish literature: it is all
narrative, and no nomos. Furthermore, Bialik had communicated that both halacha and
aggada were necessary for crafting literature with purpose and destiny. Despite his
lengthy, poetic, and inspiring introduction about the connection between zaddik and
Hasidim, about connection between heaven and earth, man and G-d, a life of ecstatic joy
51
That is, to establish the new month based on the lunar cycle 52 See “Codification of Law” in Encyclopedia Judaica
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and finding the divine messianic future in everyday reality, Buber’s anthology omits clear
reference to Jewish Law, which Bialik seems as a necessary complement to the narrative
in order to arrive at the destination (which for Buber is ecstatic joy and human
wholeness).
However, we should note that Buber did not craft an anthology of stories for
Hasidim living a life of halachic fulfillment; he was trying to convey what he construed
as the inner moral of the Hasidic Legend (namely, a life of ecstatic joy) to people of all
backgrounds53
, with no involvement in the halachic aspect of Jewish ritual law.
Therefore, one could argue that the entwined legalistic and narrative components of
Jewish religious literature that inform Hasidic life are not both necessary components of
Buber’s anthology, which has been printed in many different languages for the perusal of
all types of people. In my reading of the Tales, I expected that storytelling and law would
be blended to portray an “authentic” Hasidic legend, but that combination is not germane
to what Buber was hoping to achieve: an expression of the relationship between the “the
men who quicken” and the “quickened,” a bond between heaven and earth that leads to
pure and ecstatic joy, facilitated by studying the life of spiritual greats, the zaddikim
(Buber, 1). In the next section of the paper, I will examine several articles that also call
into question Buber’s portrayal of Hasidism (be it linguistic, historical, or otherwise)
where the author is then able to reframe our perspective and remove the demand for
53 Here we can again refer to Buber’s comment in the foreword to Hasidim: “I consider Hasidic truth vitally important for Jews, Christians, and others, and at this particular hour more important than ever before” (foreword). Furthermore, he writes in his introduction to Tales of the Hasidim that “the purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to a world of legendary reality” (1). Buber writes reader, and not specifically “Jews” or “Hasidim,” implying that whoever picks up his book and reads the legends therein will find inspiration.
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“authenticity,” instead highlighting what Buber successfully brings out of the Hasidic
legend.
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CHAPTER VI
FINDING THE HASIDIC MESSAGE BY REFRAMING OUR PERSPECTIVE
In Hebrew, the word parve is used to signify a food item that contains neither
dairy nor meat (according to laws of kashrus, one cannot mix dairy and meat food items,
but the “grey space” of parve foods may be served in combination with either meat or
dairy, for example, bread, vegetables, grains, and fruits). Colloquially, “parve” has also
come to mean inoffensive, politically correct, and aware of other’s sensibilities. In this
section, we will learn from Ran HaCohen how Buber edited the language of his work to
carry it out of the Hasidic context and into the broader, non-Hasidic world, by eliminating
potentially offensive and exclusionary esoteric references, in favor of a more gentrified,
universal rendition of the tales. Ultimately, we will see that while this editing may
validate criticism of Buber’s accuracy, the very act of editing allows the presentation of
the legend to remain true to the Hasidic ideal of elevating the mundane and revealing the
concealed divinity within creation.
In his article “The Haywagon Moves West: On Martin Buber’s Adaption of
Hasidic Legends” (2008) Ran HaCohen shows how Buber gentrified and embellished the
language of the tales, using one specific narrative that moved from the anthology into
Buber’s novel Gog and Magog. HaCohen does credit Buber with bringing an awareness
of Hasidism to the outside world, stating unequivocally that “it was Buber more than
anyone else who introduced Hasidism to Western Culture” (HaCohen, 1). However,
HaCohen qualifies this transmission, citing Mendes-Flohr, who writes that in the process
of this introduction, Buber changed superstition and “oriental backwardness” into a
“literarily presentable phenomenon,” dressing it in “neo-romantic, expressionistic
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language and style, and by association with other mystical traditions” (ibid). There are
harsher critics, such as Scholem and Schatz-Uffen, who have “accused Buber of
producing his own version of Hasidim” (ibid.). Whether Buber did create his own
romanticized (and by implication inaccurate) version of Hasidism, or transformed un-
presentable raw material into a literarily acceptable format, HaCohen shows us that
Buber did indeed change the language of the tales.
Ran HaCohen cites Ernst Simon’s division of Buber’s portrayal of Hasidim into
three periods. Phase one lasted from 1900-1910, and was “too free” in Buber’s own
words; during this time he wrote The Tales of Rebbe Nachman (1906) and The Legends
of the Baal Shem (1908). The second phase, in the 1920’s, was as faithful as possible to
the original material; during this time Buber wrote The Great Maggid and His Succession
(1921) and The Hidden Light (1924). The third period, lasting to the end of Buber’s life,
and during which Buber wrote his novel Gog and Magog (1949), combined the mythic
tendency of Buber’s Hasidic vision, and the objective standards of textually accurate
transmission.
HaCohen cites Buber’s opinion that the material was unfit for presentation the
way he found it, with “hardly ever a clear thread of narrative to follow” (2). HaCohen
points out that Buber’s comment on the unformed nature of the original material
highlights that narrative was a central focus for Buber, whereas, in the original telling of
the tale, the focus was to convey some moral message, or speak to the greatness of a
particular Tzadik. Buber claimed that he sought to reconstruct the tales in a form suited to
the subject matter, without expanding or stylizing, however, HaCohen shows us that
Buber was not entirely able to avoid a literary recrafting of the material in his attempt to
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“supply the missing links in the narrative” (ibid). HaCohen compares a tale that was
carried through the second and third periods to show that Buber did indeed change and
stylize in order to craft a new version of a new tale that expressed his particular
philosophy, in particular the I-thou dialogue. The tale, (published in 1927, 1933, and
again in 1946) entitled “Can and Want to,” is a story of Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak of
Pshysha, who learns a kabbalistic lesson from a peasant and his overturned hay wagon:
Once when the Yehudi was walking cross-country, he happened on a hay wagon
which had turned over. “Help me raise it up!” said the driver. The rabbi tried but he could
not budge it. “I can’t.” he finally said. The peasant looked at him sternly. “You can all
right,” said he, “but you don’t want to.” On the evening of that day, the Yehudi went to
his disciples. “I was told today: We can raise up the Name of G-d, but we don’t want
to.”54
The story is clearly divided into two parts; one is the scene of anecdote, and the
other is the explanation of the moral. HaCohen believes the story is “missing” a link
between the two: a scene that illustrates the moral has been learned. Without that missing
scene, HaCohen asks, how are we to connect what the Rabbi says (we can...but we don’t
want to) with the scene with the upturned wagon and the peasant’s rebuke? There is no
indication that the Rabbi could have physically lifted the wagon if he had tried, so how
was the kabbalistic moral of elevating G-d’s name extrapolated from his interaction with
the peasant?
54 Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, 228.
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HaCohen then presents the version of the tale as Buber writes it in his novel “Gog
and Magog.” The story has become highly stylized, with a more complex dialogue
between the Yehudi and the Peasant, which continues after an additional inserted scene
where the two join forces to leverage the wagon up. As the peasant and the Rabbi walk
side by side, the peasant explains “No one knows whether he can do a thing until he has
tried it” (HaCohen, 4). The Rabbi in turn, relates the whole series of events to his fellow
Hasidim in a frame story that surrounds the narrative of lifting the wagon. HaCohen is
satisfied that Buber’s presentation of the tale in frame story, with this additional scene of
the peasant and rabbi joining forces to leverage the fallen wagon, connects the seemingly
unrelated anecdotal and moral parts of the tale. The Rabbi is relating this moral tale to his
fellows, and we know that he was able to draw a kabbalistic lesson from his interaction
with the peasant, because Buber inserted a scene where indeed the wagon was lifted up—
in turn teaching us that the divine name can be elevated—an element that was missing in
the previous version of the tale.
HaCohen points out another effect of the editing and embellishing process: the
novelized version of the tale makes the experience more egalitarian, reflected in the new
title “How I Apprenticed Myself to a Peasant.” Furthermore, gone is the kabbalistic
lesson about elevating the name of G-d. Now the lesson of “can and want to” has become
more universal. Most telling, HaCohen notes, is the changed dynamic between the Rabbi
(now just “Yaakov Yitzchak” in the novel form) and the peasant. In the first version, the
peasant’s challenge was answered with a silence that abruptly transitioned into the moral.
In the novel version, there is a lengthy conversation between comrades, after they have
joined forces to lift the wagon. HaCohen reads this editing of the dynamic as an
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expression of Buber’s tendency to emphasize the hyphen between “I” and “thou.” In
other words, the original tale has become more egalitarian, in alignment with Buber’s
focus on the between space of a relationship. The Rabbi no longer takes the moral from a
peasant he passes by; he learns the moral by interacting with the peasant.
HaCohen then turns our attention to an even earlier form of the tale, as written in
the very source that Buber used, Sichot Chayim, written by Chaim Meir Yechiel of
Mogelnitz (d. 1849). To summarize, a “Jew” (the Rabbi Yehuda Yitzhak) is walking with
his disciples in the field, and a man described as “the uncircumcised” (the peasant) calls
out for help. The Rabbi and his disciples attempt to lift the wagon with the peasant, but
they cannot. The “uncircumcised” calls out in Polish “you can, but you do not want,”
upon which the Rabbi turns to his disciples and tells them that the uncircumcised is
saying that they can indeed elevate the name of G-d, but they do not want to. HaCohen
points out the many features of the tale that cannot be streamlined into a telling for a
modern literary audience, among them the multilingual nature (Hebrew and Polish), the
frequent repetition of phrases (i.e. “may his memory be for the afterlife”), and an
extensive use of abbreviations and acronyms, which is very common in Hebrew texts, but
totally lost in translation—not to mention use of the term “uncircumcised” to refer to the
gentile.
While the plot of this original version seems more similar to Buber’s first version
of the tale, a quick look will reveal that in his adaptation, Buber split the tale into two
parts, whereas in the version in Sichot Chaim, the moral is explained in the very scene of
the anecdote, when the Rabbi turns to his Hasidim in the fields and translates the Polish
wagon-driver’s reprimand into a kabbalistic moral. Most noticeable is the use of the title
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“uncircumcised” for the gentile, which connotes spiritual uncleanliness and sets up a
hierarchy between the Rabbi and the peasant, by referring to the peasant by his genitals.
HaCohen sees in Buber’s change from “uncircumcised” to “[wagon] driver” a blurring of
religious and ethnic identities that universalizes the tale, and thus “the Hasidic text is
cleansed of its xenophobic, chauvinistic elements to facilitate its reception among
modern, liberal, and/or non-Jewish readers in German, English, or Hebrew” (9).
HaCohen emphasizes a theme we noticed earlier in Buber’s philosophical writings on
Hasidism and his introduction to the Tales: The universalization of Hasidism.
HaCohen turns to a second narrative in Sichot Chaim, about a Rabbi who attempts
to buy a wagonload of wood from a gentile. The Rabbi will only give three gold coins,
but the gentile demands four, calling out “should you improve, you will be able to buy.”
The Rabbi in turn interprets this as a calling to return home and do some soul searching.
HaCohen points out that in both stories, while the Jew speaks Hebrew, the gentile speaks
Polish and is referred to as “the uncircumcised,” setting up a hierarchy between the
protagonist, so that the moral delivered seems less universal, and in fact, according to
HaCohen, “the moral is purely Hasidic...and has very little, in fact, nothing at all, to do
with the original context in which those words were said” (9). In my opinion, the
disconnect between the anecdote and the moral in the original tale implies that both the
teller and the listener must have at least an introductory grasp of kabbalistic knowledge
that can readily applied to seemingly mundane events, so that they can find spiritual
instruction in everyday life. HaCohen summarizes the formula of these tales by saying
about the tales of the Hasidim that “the lesson can be roughly formulated as: the true
Zaddik can draw a holy, religious lesson even from the words of a non-Jew” (ibid). These
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tales in their original setting cannot so readily provide moral for the non Hasidic reader
unless, they are transformed into something more universal, which is what Buber does.
HaCohen concludes that Buber has gentrified the tales of their antipodal language,
which indeed makes them more accessible to the non Hasidic reader, but also “took the
legend out of its original context, revised it to some extent and reinterpreted it according
to his aesthetic and hermeneutic principles,” writing further that “as a consequence, the
original meaning of the story has been all but lost” (10-11). Indeed, in the example
HaCohen provides, Buber’s process of reworking the tales ultimately removed the
original kabbalistic moral. However, in the broader scheme, HaCohen sees that Buber’s
methodology of restructuring the tale for a new, broader audience is actually faithful to
the Hasidic intention of finding the “divine spark” in the mundane world. Much like the
Rabbi in the story drew a kabbalistic message from the words of the peasant, Buber drew
a universal message from a Hasidic tale. Since Buber “insisted on his right to approach
the sources as a living tradition” he was able to change them in such a way that actually
emphasized the true moral (11). The seeming veneer of inauthenticy due to linguistic
editing actually allowed Buber to remain authentically true in his translation of the tales
to the message within.
Claire Sufrin also provides insightful guidance for understanding the context of
Buber’s translation of the Hasidic tales in her article “On Myth, History, and the Study of
Hasidism: Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem” (2012). Sufrin addresses the
accusations leveled at Buber from Scholem and other scholars that Tales of the Hasidim
did not accurately portray the reality of Hasidism, and that Buber was guilty of crafting a
romanticized fantasy. Sufrin challenges this accusation of inaccuracy and fantasy by
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removing Tales of the Hasidim from the historical-accuracy dialogue, and placing it
within the framework of Buber’s non-linear conception of time. Understanding Buber’s
approach helps “understand the forces that drove his writings on Hasidism” (Sufrin, 130).
In other words, Buber might not have painted an accurate portrait of Hasidism in
historiographic reality, but he did create an anthology that reflected his approach to
Jewish history.
To better understand the accusations of inaccuracy leveled by critics of Buber,
Sufrin explains Gershom Scholem’s conception of history. In Scholem’s view, there are
historical phases where mysticism takes the proverbial spotlight, and Hasidism is one of
those phases. On the other hand, Buber notes that while there are boundaries between
historical periods, what slips between the boundaries presents more importance. Rather
than noting a trend and discussing its relevance to a specific time period (the approach of
Scholem), Buber focuses on the meaning of the reoccurring theme and its significance to
Judaism overall. Similarly, in his presentation of his “I-thou” relationship dynamic, rather
than focus on the “I” or “thou,” Buber focuses on the hyphen between: the relationship.
This focus on the aspects of mysticism that slip between the time periods means that
Buber is able to connect movements as historically and religiously disparate as Hasidism
and Zionism. Buber’s study of the Jewish past to solve the problems of the present (for
example, in the early twentieth century, the place of a Jew in a modern, quickly-changing
world with several currents of Jewish thought ranging from the socialist to the traditional)
suggests that “history is porous,” and according to Sufrin, Buber’s writings on Hasidism
served as an illustration of this belief that themes from the past are applicable as lessons
for the issues of the present (regardless whatever time period that “present” refers to).
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Scholem critiqued Buber’s “poor scholarship” and asserted that Buber created a
“neo-Hasidism.” Sufrin points out that Buber would probably not deny this charge,
considering that he openly admitted to distilling the stories he collected in order to find
their “true spirit.” One of Scholem’s issues with Buber’s presentation was his focus on
the tales of the later Hasidism; by ignoring homiletic materials more characteristic of
Hasidism’s earlier days, he missed the true essence of the movement contained in the
pithy one-liners of the first generation of Rebbes. According to Scholem, only a
historical-critical approach with all sources accounted for could provide an accurate
picture of Hasidism, and thus, according to Scholem’s historiographic paradigm, Buber’s
work was incomplete and inaccurate. Buber, however, was an openly avowed interpreter
of Hasidism, and not one to pass along the material untouched by some transformation.
He wanted to convey the force of faith from those legendary days in order to renew the
ruptured bonds between G-d and man. Unlike Scholem, Buber was not interested in
exploring Hasidism in its full historically and textually accurate context; Buber preferred
to find what he construed to be the “essence of its truth.”
Sufrin explains that the practical significance of the Buber-Scholem debate relates
to the purpose and methodology of Jewish studies, addressing the question of whether the
lens through which texts are examined should be historical-critical (like Scholem), or in
search of spiritual guidance for the present age (like Buber). Sufrin’s explanation of the
Scholem-Buber debate helped clarify that Buber sought to express something of his own
philosophy through the tales, and he was not interested in the exacting approach of his
colleague Scholem. Reading Sufrin’s article helped me realize that like Scholem, I was
expecting Buber to present the tales in their “true context,” thereby missing what Buber’s
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intended to express: a legendary reality of ecstatic joy that was not tied down to a
particular time, place, or people.
Sufrin elaborates on her explanation of Scholem’s “notched, timeline view” of
history. Scholem believed that there were three phases in spiritual development: the
mythic, the religious, and the mystical. Mysticism, according to Sufrin’s explanation of
Scholem, seeks to re-piece the shattered parts of religion destroyed by
institutionalization, in order to re-facilitate the worshipper’s lost connection to the divine.
But mysticism thereby places itself in danger of turning into Gnosticism (a dramatic
tendency toward self deification, the replacement of the divinity with the human,
wrapped in layers of cultic mystery). According to Scholem, the mystical may be at odds
with the institutional, and mysticism is a notch along the overall spiritual timeline, the
phases of which play out again and again as history moves toward the messianic end-
goal. Actually, this tension between the mystical and institutional seems to have played
out in Buber’s writings as well, most notably in his perception of the conflict between
“legalistic”/rabbinic Judaism, and “spiritual”/hasidic Judaism. In his essays, Buber seems
to view Hasidism as a balanced, spiritual response the “institutionalized” extreme of
rabbinic Judaism on one hand, and the “mystical” overindulgences of Shabbetai Tzvi on
the other.
According to Sufrin, Scholem views history as linear; myth turns to religion,
which turns into mysticism, in the development of a spiritual idea along a timeline. These
three phases may re-occur, but they are still part of a timeline that moves toward the
messianic endpoint. Like Scholem, Buber acknowledged that spiritual development
moves through phases, but he also believed that the boundaries between historical periods
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are porous, and that mysticism is not a “stage” after religion, but rather a general theme
that returns repeatedly, hovering between myth (the earlier, more personalized days of the
I-thou relationship) and religion (the institutionalized relationship). Buber defined a
separation between religion (the regulated observance of literature, ritual, and law) and
religiosity (the desire for spiritual connection). For Buber, religion is necessary for
preserving religious insights, but there is a danger of religion replacing religiosity, if the
individual religious experience is consumed in heartless religious rote.
According to Buber, Hasidism was a cure for the illness of Gnostic excess found
in Sabbatianism and Frankism. Accordingly, Hasidism is a near-rejection of actualizing
the messianic future through a single human figure55
. Buber talks extensively about the
power of the zaddik and this holy leader’s role in facilitating a connection to the divine,
but much in the spirit of the I-thou philosophy, The “thou” is G-d, the “I” is everyman,
and the hyphen is the zaddik; the focus is on the relationship, and not the individual.
Sufrin highlights of the difference between Scholem’s linear approach to history,
in which the Hasidic form of mysticism is one period of a timeline, and Buber’s “porous”
approach, in which Hasidism is a rejection of linear movement toward the messianic
future, a democratic reaction against the false messianism of Shabbetai Tzvi, in favor of a
messianic future revealed in the immediate present, with fully joyous, alive, and self-
actualized participants. According to Sufrin, Buber was not interested in theology, but
rather in applying the themes of self-worth and self-actualization found throughout
Hasidic tales. In his treatises on Hasidism, Buber openly placed Tales of the Hasidism
55 I believe that Sufrin understand Buber’s democratic intentions, but if her reading is correct, I find some discrepancy between Buber’s philosophy and the actual theology of Hasidism, which, after all, is a parallel type of Orthodoxy that also subscribes to the belief in a messianic end. Refer to our previous findings from Mintz about the Rebbe’s connection to facilitating the arrival of the messiah.
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between the historical disappointments associated with Shabbatei Tzvi and Jacob Frank,
effectively positioning Hasidism as the transposition of messianic actualization from the
singular messiah figure onto the everyday am ha’aretz (ignorant, common man), if such
an individual could achieve the enlightened view that the messianic present that already
exists around him. The false messiahs Tzvi and Frank had proved for Buber that
messianic actualization needed to be democratized. He did not write Tales of the
Zaddikm, but rather, Tales of the Hasidim, and in Buber’s paradigm, everyone can be
“Hasidic,” if only they can find the ecstatic joy in union with the Divine.
In order to illustrate Buber’s view of Jewish history, Sufrin turns to Buber’s
commentaries on the Bible. Buber finds in the Hebrew Scriptures a progression in the
depiction of a relationship with G-d from the personal (the stories of Genesis) to national
(the Exodus from Egypt and the stories of the Israelite Kings) to universal (the moral
admonition of the prophets). Using his commentary on the story of Gideon (recounted in
Judges 6-8), Sufrin reads Buber as separating the biblical narrative into two components,
(1) historical moments and (2) saga (Buber chose to use the term saga instead of myth,
because the later had connotations associated with Nazi ideology), developing a type of
reading called “Tradition Criticism” which focused on the significance of the text, rather
than the structural elements discussed by source criticism. Here Sufrin is pointing out that
Buber is not so interested in historical accuracy, but that Buber sees the possibility for
universally accessible value in the stories of the Hebrew Bible, a tendency toward
universality which would later translate to his Hasidic storytelling.
For Buber, the “saga” is the aspect of the narrative which represents the memory
of the believer, carried throughout time; the historical moments are the events that
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occurred; they may relate the events of a particular time, but because they are repeated in
different guises, they speak to some broader trend with a greater significance beyond the
moment itself. Thus, in opposition to a paradigm of history versus myth, Buber develops
a view of history versus eschatology; there is no focus on an endpoint, but rather, the
history represents an ongoing theme of the “struggle to actualize life under G-d’s rule”
(Sufrin, 148). For Buber (according to Sufrin) history in Judaism is not the linear, “end-
times” focused process described by Sholem, but rather an ongoing, organic development
of a recurring theme to discover and realize divine theocracy.
In summary: for Scholem, Hasidism neutralized the Gnostic dangers of
Sabbatianism, as it was one of many notches on the timeline where myth turned to
religion, which turned to mysticism. Hasidism was a balancing force that prevented
mysticism from spiraling out of control in the wild excesses of Shabbetai Tzvi, and if
later on the timeline, a similar balancing was necessary, it could be repeated, again and
again until the messianic culmination. For Buber, Hasidism brought the messianic reality
into the present, and eliminated the need altogether for linear movement toward the
messianic future. Scholem emphasizes the stages and timeline, while Buber emphasizes
the characteristics that continually reappear. Scholem views Hasidism as a point along
the timeline (a manifestation of the recurring pattern whereby there is an appearance of
mysticism), whereas for Buber, Hasidism rejects the notion of the timeline. Hence,
according to Sufrin’s presentation of Buber’s understanding, Tales of the Hasidism are
not outside of an accurate historical context: rather, they represent Buber’s general view
of history, which is different from Scholem’s view.
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Sufrin helps reconcile some of the contradictions pointed out by critics of Buber’s
“legendary reality” by illustrating that if we consider his portrayal to be “out of context,”
it is best to reexamine our definition of “context.” For Scholem, Tales of the Hasidim
would indeed be inaccurate, but Buber is not interested in a complete, all-encompassing
historically accurate portrayal of Hasidism; rather, his goal is to distill and refine the
material until he is able to present what he perceives as its true essence, an essence that
has been expressed periodically throughout Jewish history, but now, with greater
urgency, must be clarified and presented again as a solution and cure for the
fragmentation of modern man. Sufrin’s article helped me assess my own personal bias in
approaching Buber’s work. As a practicing Hasidic Jew, I read them with an expectation
of interplay between storytelling and law, and felt a dissonance between Buber’s
depiction and the Hasidic context I have experienced, mostly because Buber ignores (or,
at best, downplays) the importance of religious stringency and halachic observance in
Hasidism. Sufrin’s article helped me to consider that perhaps by shedding my expectation
for “accuracy,” I would be open to experience the more universalized applicability of
ecstatic joy and spiritual wholeness Buber wished to share with the world through his
rendition of Hasidic storytelling.
I will now examine an article that tracks a Hasidic legend through several
iterations, and shows us that despite the change in context, the Hasidic legend carries an
innate power that is not confined to a particular time and place. In his essay “But I will
Tell of Their Deeds: Retelling a Hasidic Tale about the Power of Storytelling” (2014)
Levi Cooper tracks a Hasidic story through a period of over one hundred years, as it is
retold by Martin Buber, Y.S. Agnon, Gerschom Scholem, Walter Kaufman, Elie Wiesel
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and Abba Kovner. Cooper provides an illustration of how “the malleable Hasidic tale
may be shaped in the image of the storyteller” (Cooper, 128). Highlighting differences in
rendition of one particular story, he examines the question of whether or not the
transmitters have a duty to refrain from changing the tale.
Cooper takes a story of the Baal Shem Tov, and examines its many manifestations
through the years, beginning with a version published in 1906 by Reuven Zak56
in his
work Keneset Yisrael, a pamphlet about the Hasidic Rebbe, Israel Friedman of Ruzyn.
The story is not about the Ruzyner Rebbe, but the Hasidic master is the narrator in a
frame story of a tale about the Baal Shem Tov and the subsequent generations of
Hasidim:
Our holy master [Rabbi Israel of Rużyn] told a story of the Besht [The Baal Shem Tov],
blessed be his memory, that once there was a dire life-threatening matter where there was
a certain only son, who was very good, etc. And [the Besht] ordered that a candle of wax
be made and he traveled to the forest and attached the candle to a tree and did various
other things and performed Yiḥudim [mystical unifications of the Divine name], etc., and
brought salvation with the help of God, blessed be He. And afterwards there was such an
incident involving [Rabbi Israel’s] great-grandfather, the Holy Maggid, and he did
likewise as described above, and he said: “The Yiḥudim and kawanot [mystical
intentions, sing. kawanah] that the Besht performed I know not, but I shall act on the
basis of the kawanah that the Besht intended.” And that too was accepted. And afterwards
there was a similar incident involving the holy rabbi R. Moses Leib of Sassów, blessed be
his memory, and he said: “We do not even have the power to do that; I shall only tell the
56 a follower of the Ruzyn Hasidic Dynasty
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story, and it is up to G-d, blessed be He, to assist.” And thus it was, with the help of G-d,
blessed be He57
.
Cooper reads this story primarily as reference to the decline in mystical abilities
through the succeeding generations. The kabbalistic power of the Besht to perform
mystical unifications cannot be repeated by the Maggid of Mezritch, who can only
imitate the acts of his teacher. One generation later, Reb Moses Leib cannot even mimic
the actions, but he can tell the story of what happened. I would add that while there is a
decline in mystical abilities, which are ultimately replaced by the act of storytelling, we
are told that the storytelling is equally effective.
According to Cooper, for the generation of the Baal Shem Tov, mysticism was
central to Hasidism, but by the generation of the Ruzyner, it had receded “to part of the
collective memory of the Hasidic movement,” to be replaced by the mysticism-substitute
of storytelling, although this substitute is also effective in “mystically shaping the course
of events” (132). What the Baal Shem Tov could do with incantations, we can no longer
do, but we can relate his actions and thereby bring about the same effect. While Cooper
concludes that the main function of the above-cited tale is to illustrate the movement of
mysticism into the collective Hasidic memory, I would point out that it also reveals the
ascent of storytelling as a working spiritual practice.
Cooper examines how a series of authors successively reworked the tale,
beginning with Martin Buber. Buber took his version of the story from Reuven Zak, and
shifted the focus of the narration from the Besht to Rabbi Moshe Leib, as indicated by
57 Reuben Zak, Keneset Yisrael (Warsaw: Y. Edelstein, 1906), 23, translation by Levi Cooper; this tale was printed in Levi Cooper’s article.
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Buber’s placement of the tale in the section of Tales of the Hasidim which discussed
Rabbi Moshe Leib (Tales of the Hasidim are divided into chapters, and each chapter is
devoted to stories of a particular zaddik). Furthermore, in a later edition, he emphasized
that the Ruzyner is only the narrator to the story by titling it “The Three Generations”
(that is, the Baal Shem Tov, the Maggid, and Reb Moshe Leib). While only three
generations are needed to show the transition from mysticism to storytelling, I would
argue that the Ruzyner, who relates the tale, is the one who breaks the “fourth wall” and
brings the play into the audience, showing us that even a story about a story is effective
as the story itself. For comparison to the previous version of the tale in Zak’s Knesset
Yisrael, I have included Buber’s version of the tale below:
The Rabbi of Rizhyn related:
Once when the holy Baal Shem Tov wanted to save the life of a sick boy he was
very much attached to, he ordered a candle made of pure wax, carried it to the woods,
fastened it to a tree, and lit it. Then he pronounced a long prayer. The candle burned all
night. When morning came, the boy was well.
When my grandfather, the Great Maggid, who was the holy Baal Shem’s disciple,
wanted to work a like cure, he no longer knew the secret meaning of the words on which
he had to concentrate. He did as his master had done and called on his name. And his
efforts met with success.
When Rabbi Moshe Leib, the disciple of the disciple of the Great Maggid, wanted
to work a cure of this kind, he said: ‘We have no longer the power even to do what was
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done. But I shall relate the story of how it was done, and G-d will help.’ And his efforts
met with success58
.
Cooper notes that in Zak’s version of the tale, we do not learn so much about the
boy who the Baal Shem Tov attempts to heal; he is almost a part of the landscape, like
the tree or the candle the Baal Shem Tov carries, and the focus of the tale’s first scene is
the mystical power of the Baal Shem Tov. In contrast, Buber provides us with more
details about the sick child, and the boy almost becomes the main figure of the first scene.
The Baal Shem Tov is “very much attached to” the child, and in the morning, we find
that “the boy was well.” Unlike Zak’s version of the tale, in Buber’s version there is a
relationship between the Besht and the boy.
Cooper reads this added dynamic as emphasizing Buber’s philosophy of the I-
thou dialogue; the Besht can only cure the boy if he has a relationship with him, whereas,
in Zak’s tale, the boywas is almost a prop in the story to show the great mystical ability
of the Besht. Buber expresses this I-thou dynamic through emphasis on the zaddik-hasid
relationship which he especially labors in his introduction to Tales of the Hasidim, where
he goes to great length of illustration to show that the zaddik depends on his Hasidim,
and the Hasidim depend on their zaddik to effect connection between the upper and lower
worlds. In his essay “The Holy Way,” Buber pithily summarizes this dynamic by writing:
“realization of the Divine on earth is fulfilled not within man but between man and man”
(Buber, 113). Thus, Cooper implies that an understanding of the I-thou mentality is
crucial to understanding the way Buber translated the Hasidic tales, and Buber confirms
58 Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, vol. 2, pages 92–93
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this perception in his writings on Hasidic philosophy with his emphasis on the
relationship between zaddik and hasid.
Cooper also sees Buber’s reworking of the tale as reflective of his view on
religiousness. According to Cooper, the anthology in Jewish literature provided Jewish
cultural renewal for Zionists, and since what Buber saw in Hasidism was the religious
essence of Judaism, he proceeded to anthologize many of the Hasidic tales as part of the
literary facet of this cultural revival, beginning with The Stories of Rebbe Nachman and
The Legends of the Baal Shem. “Hasidism according to Buber demonstrated that
individual religious experience was not dependent on law, dogmas, or creeds, or
Kabbalistic mysticism; it was a message that transcended a specific personality or
historical context” (Cooper, 135). Thus, according to Cooper’s understanding, the decline
in mystical abilities (replaced by storytelling) which is expressed in the tale mirrors
Buber’s own personal belief of shifting religious focus away from set rituals, to be
replaced by a more personalized experience. Cooper’s opinion thus echoes what
HaCohen wrote in “The Haywagon,” that Buber universalized the tales in his rendition,
by deleting the kabbalistic meditations of the Besht which were referenced in the earlier
version of the tale from Keneset Yisrael and replacing them with a more general
description of prayer and candle-lighting. In conclusion, Cooper sees Buber’s reworking
of the tale as reflective of his belief in the I-thou dynamic, and his preference for
personalized religious experience over institutionalized religion.
Cooper explains that Buber’s retelling set a trend as the tale “left the Hasidic
community” for a wider readership. While this paper does focus on Buber’s Tales of the
Hasidim, I believe it would be helpful to follow Cooper’s article to the end, as it will help
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us understand the challenges in translation that arise out of Hasidic tales removed from
their original context, and much like HaCohen’s article, show us that the tales can still
express something of the essence of Hasidic philosophy even through their translation.
According to Cooper, the most significant change in this tale came with S.Y.
Agnon’s retelling, originally in a 1960 edition of Haaretz newspaper. Agnon changes the
Ruziner from the narrator of a frame story (as in Buber and Zak’s tale) to the very hero
who is called upon to save a sick boy’s life. The Ruziner relates that once the Baal Shem
Tov was faced with the exact same case, and he saved a boy’s life with kabbalistic ritual.
The Maggid, faced with a similar situation, could only imitate the actions of his teacher
the Besht, and Reb Moshe Leib could only tell of their deeds while standing in the same
place in the woods where their predecessors stood. The Ruziner relates that not even that
could be done, but that by retelling the deeds of the Tzadikim, we can bring salvation.
By making the Ruziner the main character, Agnon’s version thus shifts the focus
of the tale from the theurgic ritual of the Besht and the subsequent decline in mystical
abilities, to the storytelling of the Ruziner. Agnon further highlights this shift by
juxtaposing his next addition of the tale (in 1961) with a statement attributed to the
Ruziner: “Alas, now that the world is in a state of smallness, when the Tzadik needs to
benefit the world, he does so only through telling stories and ordinary conversation”
(Cooper, 141). Thus, unlike Zak’s version (which Cooper reads as emphasizing the
decline in mystical ability), and unlike Buber’s version (which Cooper reads as an
expression of Buber’s preference for personalized religious experience and I-thou
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philosophy), Cooper reads Agnon’s version as the one that most (thus far) emphasizes the
power of a Hasidic tale to transform reality through storytelling59
.
A further development in the translation of the tale occurred when Agnon
reprinted his version (again in the Israeli newspaper HaAretz) ten days later, writing that
he had found its antecedent from the Midrash, specifically the medieval work Yalkut
Shimoni: a four part tale about the Davidic Kings. King David pursued and overcame his
enemy with divine assistance. King Asa knew he could not overcome his foe, but relied
on divine assistance to pursue and conquer. King Jehoshaphat knew he could not pursue,
but sang praises to G-d, and G-d took care of the enemy. King Hezekiah could not even
sing praise; he just relied on G-d and the enemy was vanquished. Cooper initially
questions why Agnon would juxtapose this midrashic tale with the tale of Ruziner, seeing
no ostensible similarity other than the four-part structure, and a reference to a decline in
spiritual or kabbalistic abilities.
Cooper suggests this juxtaposition as Agnon’s addition of a new dimension to the
Hasidic tale, which was formerly focused on the storytelling abilities of the Ruziner.
Since the midrashic tale of David Kings emphasizes that, despite a decline in spiritual
levels, G-d was and is the hero of the story, effecting salvation in all four parts despite the
spiritual strength of the king, we can also (by the connection of contrast between the
tales) view G-d as the hero of the Ruziner story. Whether the boy’s healing is achieved
through the means of the Besht’s kabbalistic incantations, or the Ruziner’s storytelling,
G-d is the one who affects healing. Thus, Cooper posits that “Agnon told the same story
59 Cooper brings another example of the power of the Hasidic story to effect changes in reality, specifically stories of the Besht. It is said that the Besht advised one of his disciples that hemorrhaging after circumcision could be stemmed with the ashes of a frog. When Joshua of Belz (the second Belzer Rebbe) was unable to obtain a frog in a similar emergency, due to the lack of frogs in the autumn season, he told the story of the Besht, with the same curative result.
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in two different ways: first as a story about storytelling, and then as a story about faith”
(145). As proof that Agnon viewed this faith component as crucial to the moral of the
story, Cooper cites the fact that Agnon would never again publish the tale without the
midrashic precedent.
Gershom Scholem provides the next iteration of the tale in his lecture “Hasidism:
the Last Phase,” part of a series of lectures that would be later published as Major Trends
in Jewish Mysticism; Scholem specifically states that he used Agnon’s version of the tale.
Cooper wonders why Scholem went against his own orientation towards textual accuracy
and chose to use Agnon’s retelling of the tale, instead of Zak’s earlier version. Cooper
answers that Agnon’s version contains something that Zak’s does not, namely the
addition of the Ruziner saying “and for us, we have the power not even to do that; all we
can do is to tell the deeds of the tsadiqim, and G-d, may He be blessed, will act.”
However, Scholem amends this ending slightly, omitted any reference to G-d, and has the
Ruziner say “we cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the
place, but we can tell the story of how it was done” (Cooper, 147). Scholem adds that the
storyteller (Agnon) concludes that telling the story had the same effect as the theurgic
prayers. While Agnon’s version highlights the decline of mystical abilities (and their
replacement by storytelling power) it still attributes the role of hero to G-d. Scholem
chooses to remove the spiritual reference made by Agnon. Furthermore, the boy is
entirely missing from Scholem’s version, removing the element of the I-thou dialogue
that Buber had emphasized in his version.
For Scholem, the tale symbolizes the decay of a great movement, and he selects
this story in particular because it provides a solid end to his lectures by emphasizing that
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point. Furthermore, according to Cooper, Scholem wishes to illustrate the shortcomings
of academia in understanding mysticism. The professor expounding the history of
Hasidism can do nothing more than talk about Jewish mysticism, just as the Ruziner can
do no more than relate the story of the Besht. However, Cooper sees an additional
message in Scholem’s retelling, which Scholem himself expresses. “You can say that it
reflects the transformation of all its values...all that remained of the mystery was the tale”
(Cooper 149). Scholem continues by saying that “the story is not ended...and the secret
life it holds can break out tomorrow in you or me” (ibid). In other words, Scholem views
the tale as revealing the nature of Jewish mysticism to return in stages, through different
guises. Once it was the theurgic incantations of the Besht; then it was the imitation of the
Maggid; then it was the verbal recounting of Reb Moshe Leib; finally, removed from
ritual, time, and place, it was the mere retelling of the story. While Buber sees the tale as
a vehicle for expressing the I-thou, and Agnon sees the tale as expressing divine
salvation, Scholem sees the tale as expressing trends in Jewish Mysticism (which would
become the title of his lecture).
Cooper next brings us to Walter Kaufmann’s version of the tale. Kauffman uses
the tale in his work Critique of Religion and Philosophy, and adds a fifth layer to the
story, which Cooper reads as a rejection of the story’s potential spiritual elements. In this
fifth layer of narrative woven around the original prayer of the Besht, Kauffmann himself
asserts that the story is just a story. Perhaps the Maggid could imitate the Besht; perhaps
Reb Moshe could return to the very scene and relate verbally what the Maggid had done;
perhaps the Ruziner could sit at home and relate the tale from afar what Reb Moshe had
done, but Kaufman rejects the responsibility of retelling their deeds, and even the
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possibility of the original scene. “Indeed, a little research might recover the prayer and
determine the place, but we do not think that knowing both would help” (Cooper 151).
Kaufman then states that a sixth layer of the story, added by the next generation, might
address the polemical issue of Jewish vs. Christian piety, at which point Cooper sees the
tale as being very removed from its original context as it enters the realm of theological
polemics. Cooper views Kaufmann’s interpretation of the tale as its “death knell,” which
perhaps means that the next several iterations of the tale would no longer express the
optimistic theme of the power in storytelling, but rather pessimistic or critical viewpoints
of the teller (152).
To illustrate yet again how the tale became an expression of the author’s opinion,
Cooper cites the retelling of the tale in Elie Wiesel’s novella, Souls on Fire: Portraits and
Legends of Hasidic Masters, in which Wiesel “wove Hasidic stories together with his
own memories, insights, lingering thoughts, and vignettes” (Cooper, 153). In Wiesel’s
version, the sick boy has totally disappeared, to be replaced by the threat of a terrible
catastrophe which looms over the Jewish people, which the Besht averts through mystical
rites. A similar catastrophe looms in the time of the Maggid, Reb Moshe, and the
Ruziner, but each of them are able to ward off the impending doom, even as the theurgic
prowess of the Besht morphs into the storytelling power of the Ruziner. However, Wiesel
ends the tale with a depressing conclusion, that the catastrophe was not stopped this time.
“Perhaps we are no longer able to tell the story. Could all of us be guilty? Even the
survivors? Especially the survivor?” (Cooper 154). Wiesel’s holocaust-survivor-guilt has
been woven into the story, to express a conclusion that the power of the tale is no longer.
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On the other hand, Hebrew novelist Abba Kovner expressed his belief that the
story must be told, despite our inability to return to the time, place, and ritual of Besht.
Furthermore, Cooper explains, the story had a special connection to Kovner’s own
personal life. Kovner commanded a troop of partisan rebels against the Nazis, hiding in
the Rudniki woods after the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto. When Kovner’s son
expressed a desire to see the forest where his father lived and fought against the Nazis,
Kovner rejected the possibility that the place still existed. In his writing, he said he could
not remember the place, and poetically connected his biography with the story of Besht,
writing “we no longer can light the fires we lit then, or stand in that unique place,” as if
his fight against the Nazis was like the prayer of the Hasidic master, uttered to ward off
catastrophe from the Jewish people (Cooper, 156). However, unlike Weisel’s guilt-ridden
conclusion, Kovner writes that despite our inability to return to the time and place, we
must tell the story to our children. Kovner refers specifically to the Holocaust, but Cooper
calls our attention to the fact that this comment can be read as a continuation of the story
itself: just as the heirs of the Besht could not understand his kabbalistic ritual, yet carried
the power of his actions through history by retelling the story, we may not be able to
comprehend the meaning of the Holocaust, but we can communicate the terrible memory
of that event by telling the story nonetheless. Thus, Cooper uses Kovner’s plea to “tell the
story” to highlight the power of the tale to carry a message or a memory from generation
to generation60
.
60 For further reading on Hasidic folklore and the Holocaust, see Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust by Yaffa Eliach, who collected the tales from survivors through interviews and oral histories (xxii). In contrast to Wiesel’s dark questioning, she writes that the “main themes of Hasidic tales are love of humanity, optimism, and a boundless belief in G-d and the goodness of mankind" (xvi). While it is difficult for words to encapsulate the horrors of six million killed, she also writes that "the very nature of the Hasidic tale
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Cooper believes the tale becomes revitalized as it entered the circle of liberal
Jewish-American writers. Ron Wolfson, professor of education at the American Jewish
University, used the tale as a metaphor for expressing the relationship of the assimilated,
religiously-unaffiliated Jew to the Passover Seder. Much like the generations following
the Besht could not replicate his acts, but could only tell of the deeds in the preceding
generation, the modern Jew may feel disconnected from the ritual of the seder, let alone
connected to the ancient sacrificial rites of the Passover service as it was in the ancient
Temple. Yet, they can still gather the family together and read the Haggada, and by doing
so, tap into the meaning of the holiday.
However, Cooper notes, in a gross mistake, Wolfson replaced the Ruziner Rebbe
with the Rabbi Israel Salanter, a Rabbi in the Lithuanian camp, far removed from the
context and philosophy of Hasidism. Cooper uses this dramatically altered version, which
breaks the Hasidic chain of transmission with the inauthentic addition of a non-Hasidic
Rabbi, to raise the question of how many details of the story can be changed before the
storyteller is no longer telling the same tale. Cooper has shown us versions of the tale by
several writers (Buber, Scholem, Kaufman, Weisel, and Wolfson), and each of them
changed the tale somewhat to support their philosophy; for Buber it was the I-thou
dialogue; for Scholem it was the decline in mystical abilities, etc. In Wolfson’s case,
however, the emendation was accidental, but Cooper writes that this mistake proves the
very point of the story more than anything: we have forgotten even how to tell the
story...but even by making an attempt to tell it, we tap into the meaning of the tale.
made it a most appropriate literary form through which to come to terms with the Holocaust and its aftermath" (xvii).
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Cooper then highlights a more recent, musical retelling of the tale by Mark Novak
and Renee Brachfeld, who recorded the tale with musical accompaniment in 1996. This
version, although farthest away chronologically from the Zak version, seems to me the
most authentically linked to the context of live Hasidic storytelling, in that the story is
orally told in a recording, and incorporates other Hasidic elements, such as wordless
melodies (niggun). Cooper cites yet another version of the tale, broadcast via radio in
Israel during a severe drought of 2011 by Kalman Ber of Kol Chai (The Voice of Life)
Radio Station. The conflict in the story was changed from a sick boy to a drought,
reflecting the situation of the time, much like Wiesel and Kaufman had amended their
versions of the tale to become holocaust references. I view this retelling as closer to the
“casual” context of Hasidic storytelling that Mintz observed between Hasidim (and
Hasidim who shared stories with him), because even though a central element to the story
was changed, the editing was geared towards making the story applicable to the situation
of the moment, a central, organic trait I had observed firsthand in real life Hasidic
storytelling, which I will discuss in the last section of this paper.
Cooper asks us to consider how we view these changes and corruptions to the
tale, asking: “Is it a mysticism substitute, a paradigm for religious experience, an
opportunity to promote faith in G-d, a lamentation for a lost era...or an invitation to
participate?” (162). I would say the tale is all of these things, and Cooper seems to agree,
concluding that the longevity of the tale is found in its malleability. Cooper accurately
defines this essence in the close of his essay, quoting the son of the Ruziner Rebbe, Rabbi
David Moses Friedman of Czortkow, who said the “tales the tsadiqqim recount are [told]
according to the need of the moment” (Cooper 163). Rabbi Friedman then noted that he
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had heard Tzadikim recount the same tale in different ways, based on the occasion. This
healing power of the tale—whereby the problems of the present can be solved by a
solution found in the Hasidic tale—is a function of its malleability. The multiplicity of
the tale proposed by Cooper may seem to contradict the universal possibility of the tale
presented by Buber, but I argue that its very malleability, whereby anyone can find a
meaningful message, is what makes the tale universal. A legend set in proverbial stone
with one monolithic moral applicable to a particular group of people could not present
universalized possibility. The Hasidic tale, by its nature, is the very opposite. As Cooper
has shown us, the Hasidic tale is an organic creation that changes through time, and
appears in different guises based on different situations. This idea of the telling the tale
for the needs of the moment is written about by Buber himself in the 1946 preface to
Tales of the Hasidim.
In his preface, Buber writes that the Hasidim, witnesses to the great events
involving their zaddikim, retold the events in words that “were more than mere words;
they transmitted what had happened to coming generations, and with such actuality that
the words in themselves became events” (xvii). He then goes on to quote an unnamed
Rabbi whose grandfather was a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, who says that a story
“must be told in such a way that it constitutes help in itself” (ibid). This rabbi then relates
how his lame grandfather recounted how the holy Besht used to hop and dance while
praying, whereupon the rabbi leapt out of his chair and was cured of his lameness. Here
we have an example of the story being told according to the needs of the moment, with a
curative power to effect a change in reality.
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Buber goes on to write that the primarily oral transmission of the tales was not
accompanied by a large scale written tradition for the masses, but that Hasidic masters
would write down the deeds of their disciples for personal study, such as Rabbi Levi
Yitzchak of Berdichev, who wrote down all the deeds of his teacher, the Maggid of
Mezritch. This lack of written redaction, according to Buber, resulted in very few
uncorrupted versions of the tales.
And furthermore, while in most cultures, legends and literature occur side-by-side
in such a way that they are able to influence one another, this was not the case with the
Hasidic legend, and “not until our own era were they couched in literary form” (ibid
xviii). Buber asserts that the Hasidim could not model tales of the zaddikim on any
literary example, and that the inner pulse of the oral tales was too full of life to confine in
the calm form of the written word. In conclusion, “the life of the zadikkim and the
hasidim’s rapturous joy therein...is precious metal, though all too often not pure” (xix).
Buber thus implies that his task is to take the raw material of the Hasidic tale, remove the
dross, and cast the tales into a literary form: an anthology called Tales of the Hasidim.
Taking the Besht as his example, Buber writes that oral legends were circulated
during his lifetime that were “brief indications of his greatness,” which twenty-five years
later were written down by Rabbi Moshe Hayim Efraim (the grandson of the Besht) in
Degel Machane Yehuda, or The Camp Flag of Ephraim, and meanwhile, around the same
time, disciples of the Besht published Keter Shem Tov, or The Crown of the Good Name.
Buber writes that nearly half a century after his lifetime, the first biography of the Besht,
Shivtei HaBesht, or, In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov, was published, but that the second
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half of the nineteenth century was already marked by corruption in the transmission,
wherein the stories appeared as “thin and wordy narratives” (ibid).
Buber is obviously unsatisfied with the written compilations of Hasidic folklore
up to this point, and goes on to say that it is his purpose to “do justice simultaneously to
legend and truth, and supply the missing links in the narrative” (xx). His self-described
process involved rejecting the “notes” of the Hasidim, and reconstructing the tales in a
form “suited to the subject matter,” after which Buber returned to the “notes” in order to
incorporate certain flavors and phrases that were missing from his reconstructions (ibid).
Buber vehemently insists that he did not embellish or expand the tales, unlike the
methodology of the brothers Grimm61
. He divides the tales into two groupings: legendary
anecdote, and legendary short story. For the most part, Tales of the Hasidim are
legendary anecdotes, and Buber describes the preponderance of this form to the “Jewish
Diaspora spirit” to express events in a pointed manner, where the irrelevant material has
been removed, and the material arranged to point towards some conclusion of
significance. For Buber, a short story recounts a single incident that references a single
destiny; an anecdote recounts a single incident that references an entire destiny, and the
legendary anecdote goes beyond even that to convey the meaning of life (ibid xxi). For
Buber, no other literature in the world can convey with such poignancy the meaning of
life, as much as the Hasidic anecdote. Buber warns us that there may seem to be
repetition in the Tales, but that if a motif is repeated, its meaning is actually different
based on the context, which again fortifies the notion of the Hasidic tale being told in
response to the context.
61 This is not my own assessment, but rather, what Buber himself writes.
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Buber writes that Tales of the Hasidim contains less than a tenth of the material he
collected. He set aside whatever tales did not create an “accurate portrait” of each zaddik,
and taking the ones that (Buber believed) did create an accurate portrait, arranged them to
create a picture of the zaddik’s life story. He arranged the tales in a “biographical” but
not a “chronological” order, in order to clarify what he had in mind about that particular
zaddik. For example, in writing of the Besht, Buber arranged the tales into ten categories:
1) the soul of the Besht; 2) preparation and revelation; 3) ecstasy and fervor; 4) his
community; 5) his disciples; 6) the Besht with the people; 7) strength and vision; 8)
holiness and miracles; 9) the Holy Land and redemption; 10) before and after his death
(xxiii). While the arrangement is not chronological, for Buber it adequately portrays an
accurate picture of the Baal Shem Tov, reminding us of Sufrin’s conclusion that Buber is
not so interested in historical accuracy as much as he is interested in historical theme, and
furthermore, that the need of the moment is not a biographical rendition of the Baal Shem
Tov’s life, but rather an expression of the Baal Shem Tov’s Hasidic message—and
therefore a chronological arrangement is unnecessary.
Buber writes that his journey of re-telling the hasidic tales began around the turn
of the century with Tales of Rabbi Nahman (1906) and The Legend of the Baal Shem
(1907). However, Buber admits that his first two books were “too free” in the
interpretation of the material, and that successively, his books The Great Maggid and His
Succession (1921) and The Hidden Light (1924) were reflective of his new concept of the
task at hand. Tales of the Hasidim was mostly written after his arrival in the Holy Land
after 1938. “I owe the urge to this new and more comprehensive composition to the air of
this land,” Buber writes, citing the Talmudic dictum of the sages that the air of the land
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makes one wise (xxiv). Buber, in his prologue, thus positions his involvement with
Hasidic folklore as a journey that allowed him to feel spiritually and physically settled as
a Jew (in the land of Israel), but he also emphasizes that the Hasidic tale is told according
to the needs of the moment, and that the tale has the power to create a better reality. We
can perhaps read this in Buber’s decision to conclude the prologue with reference to his
decision to live in Israel. The “reality” of two world wars, a holocaust, and European
Jewry left in a state of physical and directional crisis, was personally “cured” for Buber
through his involvement in Hasidic folklore, where he found depth, purpose, and an
answer to the questions of separation between spirit and matter.
In conclusion, we see from Buber’s prologue that he is quite open about taking
poetic license with the translation of the tales, in order to arrive at translating what he
perceives as their inner essence. HaCohen shows us that Buber’s linguistic edits, while
weakening textual authenticity, actually allowed Buber to remain true to the Hasidic ideal
of elevating the mundane by finding a spiritual moral within a worldly event, for Buber
found a universal moral within the Hasidic tale. Sufrin writes that by reframing our
demand for historical accuracy, we can address the challenges leveled against Buber of
portraying Hasidism along romanticized, inaccurate lines. Finally, Cooper illustrates that
the inherent nature of a Hasidic tale is indeed change, and Buber’s edits were part of a
long, continuing, organic process where the tale provides fresh meaning based on the
time, place, and audience. Buber edits the tales, because he tells them for what he
perceives as the need of the moment: the need to address the crisis of modern man, a
crisis of separation of spirit and matter, man and G-d, and even man and fellow man. By
recounting the acts of the zaddikim, “those who stood the test” of life, we can find the
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path to “being human,” being whole, and experiencing a life of ecstatic joy. In the next
section, we will explore how both Buber and I came to this path.
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CHAPTER VII
OUR WAY TO HASIDISM AND HASIDIC STORYTELLING TODAY
Buber’s 1918 essay “My Way to Hasidism” opens up our understanding of how
Buber connected to the Hasidic tale. In the introductory paragraphs of this essay, he
defines the word Hasid as a “pious man.” Buber further defines the word by its
introduction in a Mishnaic text which states “what is mine is yours, and what is yours is
yours, this [person] is a Hasid” (Pirke Avot, 5:13)62
. With this definition from the
Mishna, Buber highlights a “Hasid” as one with no claim to any possessions. Such pious
men journeyed to the Holy Land to bring about the Kingdom of G-d, but repeatedly met
with no success, until the Baal Shem Tov arose in Eastern Europe and formed a
community of men dedicated to relating the “spiritual” to the “physical.” Thus, Buber
posits the Baal Shem Tov as reinterpreting of the term Hasid, from signifying asceticism
and devotional piety in the face of great difficulty, to a member of a community that
seeks to live with spiritual enlightenment wherever they are.
Buber continues by writing that, “nowhere in the last centuries has the soul force
of Judaism so manifested itself as in Hasidism” (17). And yet, despite the fact that
Hasidism is merely manifesting that which is already inherent in Judaism, it brings about
a new freedom. It does not alter the Jewish law by one bit, but invigorates it with fresh
life. While the outward trappings (here presumably Buber means language, clothing, and
ritual) appear medieval, the inner truth is regenerated. Buber is very clear that (in his
62 Buber actually misquotes the Mishna and says “what is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine,” and according to the same Mishna he refers to, such a person is actually an am ha’aretz [an ignorant person] (Buber, Hasidism, 16).. I believe that Buber means to quote the particular part of the Mishna I have referred to, since this is the part that defines a Hasid.
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opinion) the Hasidic movement in his day had decayed, but that process initiated by this
spiritual awakening cannot be stopped.
Buber is very direct in saying that his essay is not the place to explain the
philosophy of Hasidism, but he summarizes the movement in a few pithy lines. “G-d can
be beheld in each thing and reached through each pure deed,” and anyone who looks can
find Him (17). Therefore, it is not sufficient to serve G-d in moments of ritual alone, but
rather in man’s entire life, eating, drinking, sleeping, working, and other activities. Daily
life is replete with opportunities to serve G-d. Hasidism creates the possibility of a
kingdom of perfect unity between body and soul, matter and spirit, such as Europe had
never seen before. The fact that Buber refers to “Europe” and not specifically “European
Jewry” again highlights the universalism of his interpretation of the Hasidic message.
Buber transitions into his biography, telling us that he grew up in Galicia with his
grandparents. He was taken often to the town of Sadagora, the seat of a Hasidic dynasty,
where he saw the Hasdim and their Rebbe in the shul. Buber is somewhat critical of the
Rebbes of his generation, writing that they were petty magicians attempting to preserve
the legendary power of their grandfathers. And yet, despite this perceived degeneration,
Buber sees on their foreheads the spark of brilliance, and the austerity of character
inherited from their ancestors, the zaddikim of yesteryear “in who the immortal finds its
mortal fulfillment” (19). In any case, Buber sees the zadikim of his day as mediators for
the Hasidim to obtain their physical needs, but in moments of watching the Rebbe pray,
or expound upon the mysteries of the Torah at the third meal of the Sabbath, there can be
seen the primordial glow of light which was made for the perfected man63
.
63 Here Buber is referring to the midrashic teaching that G-d stowed away the primordial light of creation for the enjoyment of the perfectly righteous.
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As a child watching the darkly-clad, fur-hatted Hasidism, Buber was struck with
the realization that the world is indeed in need of a perfected man and true helper, and
even if the Rebbes of his childhood memory were not the perfected legends of yesteryear,
still they represented the concept of a “helper in spirit, teacher of world-meaning,” the
very concept of which is “the seed for future world orders” (19). Here again we see an
allusion to Buber’s philosophy on Hasidism as a movement with universal potential; he
takes the figure of the “Rebbe” as a concept that can be lifted out of Hasidism and
applied to the larger world. He is the helper that can facilitate the journey towards
wholeness, a world of spirit and matter united. What Buber saw most in these childhood
memories, his glimpses of Hasidim, was genuine community and genuine leadership.
Although the splendor of the Rebbe’s palace and the enraptured worship of the Hasidim
was strange and repulsive to Buber, he knew then that “common reverence and common
joy of soul are the foundations of genuine human community” (Buber, 20).
As Buber grew older, more educated, and more rational, the child-like
wonderment he experienced in Savagorda was no more. He looked down upon the
movement, but in retrospect, it was only because he did not wish to see what he had seen
previously (Buber, 21). And yet, despite this alienation from Hasidism, it was during
these years he first learned of the Baal Shem Tov, although the name would not yet have
significance for him until some years later. Buber’s childhood had been spent in the
company of his grandfather, who ceaselessly worked on translating the Midrash, and as
long as he lived with his grandfather, his roots were firmly in Judaism. Upon leaving, he
lived in a world of self-described confusion, “without Judaism, without humanity, and
without the presence of the divine” (Buber, 22). The discovery of Zionism once again
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pulled Buber towards Judaism, for the rootless feeling inside was perhaps the feeling of
all Jews in the absence of a homeland. And yet, Zionism was not enough, for even with a
land to call home, Buber sensed that there would be something more. However, Zionism
was still the port from which the ship of spiritual exploration set sail. His search for this
Judaism with meaning led him to Hasidism.
Buber decided to relearn Hebrew, presumably at least in partial connection to his
Zionist involvement. One day he happened upon a book entitled Zevaat Ribesh (an
account of the Baal Shem Tov), and (as we have read Potok mention) Buber was very
much affected by the description of the Baal Shem Tov’s passion for serving G-d, a
fervor so intense that his very actions, even the mundane act of rising from sleep, allow
him to become a creator like the Creator of the universe. “It was then that, overpowered
in an instant, that I experienced the Hasidic soul” (24). The image of the Rebbe and the
Hasidim from his childhood hit him in that moment, and coupled to the words of Zevaat
Ribesh describing the Besht, Buber saw the essence of Judaism: creation in the image of
G-d was a living task, and Buber’s mission was to express this notion of the perfected
man (the zaddik) and his community (the hasidim) to the world. For five years after this
realization he withdrew from the world and began to search and gather the fragments, by
which he means, Hasidic legends and anecdotes.
His first project was The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, and the layers of commentary
around the tales made Buber feel as if he needed to strip away the layers and bring forth
the original words of the master. The end result was disappointingly paltry, and Buber
felt that he would need to recast the tales in his own words, much as a painter makes his
own strokes, inspired by the work of his master. Buber began to translate the tales, and by
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the time he had reached the last two, he grown free in his interpretation, added new parts,
and found himself bonded with the spirit of Rabbi Nachman, bringing forth the master’s
tales with more clarity and faithfulness than the Rabbi’s own direct disciples (according
to Buber). Next Buber moved on to collect legends of the Baal Shem Tov, both from
texts and from the mouths of the people (Buber does not specific who these people are).
Buber felt that he was faithfully transmitting the tale, despite his interpretations and
additions, but. Indeed, “the greater the independence became, the more deeply I
experienced the faithfulness” (26). Later Buber reflected on his poetic license as too free,
but Buber’s reshaping of the tale may actually be in line with the idea of Hasidic
storytelling as malleable and oriented towards the present needs of the moment, as we
have seen illustrated by Cooper’s article about the progression of Hasidic tale through
several narrators, including Buber himself.
Buber concludes his essay by narrating a personal event. After delivering one of
his lectures on Judaism, he retired to a coffee house to have a lively philosophical give-
and-take with some young students. He was approached by a servant from his father’s
house, whom he had probably not encountered since childhood. The simple man sat with
the group and listened to the philosophers debate and discuss, devotedly but with no
understanding. Finally, he pulled Buber aside and asked about a potential suitor for his
daughter, a young man who had just obtained a degree. Was he steady? Did he have a
good head on his shoulders? Should the young man become a doctor or a lawyer? While
Buber answered the first two questions in the affirmative, the last one he declined to
answer, whereupon the man insisted that Buber could answer if he wanted to, but
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nonetheless, thanked Buber for his time, and left. It was then that Buber realized the role
of a zaddik as a leader, who the simple man turns to for guidance.
Buber writes that all men have a responsibility to act in a way that positively
affects the world, since their every action, no matter how small, can have lasting
repercussions. And yet, there are some men who are often confronted with the special
responsibility of guiding others—not rulers and statesmen, whose decisions involve the
masses—but rather, a spiritual guide who deals with men on an individual basis, and
gives them an answer to their concerns. This is the zaddik, and through his help, he
elevates those who come to him; “he elevates their need before he satisfies it” (Buber,
30). He is a guide and helper who helps the common man sanctify his life, and unifies the
spiritual and the physical. The world is in need of such a perfected figure, Buber
concludes.
This personal essay presenting autobiography through the lens of philosophical
discussion about the journey to Hasidism, ending with a narrative about how Buber
realized the advice-giving responsibility of the zaddik, implies that Buber’s mission is to
carry the knowledge of this perfect leader and his community out into the wider world,
and thus, Buber was most inclined to express the essence of Hasidism through tales of the
leaders, the zaddikim. Indeed, looking back over his brief autobiography, we see that it
was the scene of the leader and his community that awakened in young Buber an interest
in Hasidism, and when this image coupled with the words of fervor he read in Zebaat
Ribesh, he recognized that the “Hasidic soul” was expressed through the Hasidic Tale;
hence Tales of the Hasidim becomes Buber’s vehicle for carrying this teaching into the
world.
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At the outset of my paper, I had mentioned that as a practicing Hasidic Jew, I felt
some distance between the lifestyle I lived and observed around me, and Buber’s
anthology, namely because—while emphasizing joy, spiritual wholeness, and connection
to a zaddik—Buber downplayed the importance of Jewish Law, not mentioning it more
than in passing. Earlier I referenced articles by Bialik and Levine that stressed the
importance of nomos in relation to narrative, but the articles by Cooper, Sufrin, and
HaCohen helped me to reframe my expectations. I would like to share a few scenes of
Hasidic storytelling that I observed firsthand, in order to examine the limits of Buber’s
concept of “ecstatic joy” and “spiritual wholeness” in comparison to Hasidic storytelling
as I have experienced it. In my conclusion, I would like to relate a personal storytelling
experience that—along with the aforementioned articles—helped me reconcile with
Buber’s goals as a storyteller, and recognize the value of his process.
A scene from a Chabad fabrengen will illustrate Hasidic storytelling as I had
come to know it (a fabrengen is a gathering of story, song, food, drink, Chassidic
teaching, often geared toward mutual encouragement amongst Chasidim towards self-
betterment). It was a Shabbos (Sabbath) afternoon in the summer of 2014, and Rabbi S.
Sherman, Rabbi of the Chabad Synagogue of the Main Line outside of Philadelphia, told
a story of a Hasid who raised a large sum of money to redeem a fellow Jew taken captive
by the local Polish landlord64
. The landlord took the money, and then informed the
hapless philanthropist that the prisoner was already dead. That night, an angel approached
the Hasid in a dream, and offered a reward for attempting to fulfill this mitzvah; the
Hasid would merit one of two things. Either he could taste the delight of the world-to-
64 Redeeming a captive Jew from prison is considered one of the 613 Torah Commandments
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come, or all the money he had given to the prince would be returned. The Hasid chose to
taste the delight of the world to come.
Rabbi Sherman concluded the story by relating that the late Lubavitcher Rebbe,
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Shneerson, would say that the Hasid of this story could not be
a Hasid of Chabad, for if he was, he would have taken the money. Rabbi Sherman gave a
pause for comic effect, and then went on to explain that the money could have been used
for further tangible good deeds, such as redeeming other captives. Tangentially, this
conclusion illustrates the philosophy of Chabad Hasidus (Chabad Hasidic philosophy) as
action-oriented. However, the “taste” of the world to come that the Hasid merited was
that the angel taught him the niggun (wordless melody) referred to as ani zemiros. Rabbi
Sherman then launched into singing this niggun, and the men assembled around the table
joined him in song. This fabrengen was like a scene right out of Buber’s storytelling, live
and in person. If I had read such a story in Buber’s anthology, I would have been able to
picture the food, music, clothing, and general atmosphere, since I had experienced these
elements first hand. What about a reader who had never attended a fabrengen? Could
they experience the same effect upon reading the tale? How could they incorporate the
tale into their own life as much as the Hasidic Jews who could now attribute greater
significance to the niggun they sang?
I perceived the fabrengen as “authentic” Hasidic storytelling, and not only
because it involved real Hasidim telling a story. The setting was certainly Hasidic, but the
audience was also comprised of people who lived their life according to the philosophy of
the Hasidim—that is, they adhered to a system of believe and practice set forth by a
Hasidic Rebbe (in this case, the Alter Rebbe, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi). The story
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reflected a nomos applicable to their life (namely the commandment to redeem captives),
and it was told to provide additional insight to the singing a niggun that would feature
prominently in the liturgy of the coming holidays at the end of the summer season. In
contrast to Buber’s stories, which are mostly devoid of descriptive context other than his
translated words, here in front of my very eyes was the food, the music, the dress, the
Sabbath day, and the lifestyle in all its authenticity, not only because of appearances, but
also because the participants lived the Hasidic lifestyle. But should it be the case that the
teller, audience, and context be Hasidic in order to express the “authentic” inner message
of the story?
Upon further reflection I realized that the issue of “Hasidic storytelling” was a
little more complicated than the purism of a Hasidic fabrengen with live Hasidim.
Another story experienced first-hand will illustrate this complexity: Rabbi M.
Goldberger, the Hasidic Rabbi of the Tiferes Yisrael Synagogue in Baltimore, told a story
of his trip to Israel during his Shabbos Drasha (Sabbath sermon). The story was as
follows: while he was at the kotel (the plaza in front of the Western Wall), a car pulled up
and Rabbi Yaakov Chaim Kanievsky (a well-known, non-Hasidic Torah authority in this
generation) emerged from the vehicle. Immediately Israeli soldiers surrounded the Rabbi
for his security. The crowd of Jews pressed around the Rabbi, attempting to get a look at
the great spiritual leader. One particularly vocal man screamed out “We demand to see
the gadol hador (the great one of the generation65
).” He repeated this over and again, and
finally the soldiers parted, whereupon the man recited a loud blessing66
. Rabbi
Goldberger told this story to illustrate how in the Jewish month of Tishrei, we should be
65
Actually, Rabbi Kanievsky is regarded by many Hasidim as well to be the pre-eminent halachic Torah authority in this generation 66 There is a special blessing which is recited for seeing a preeminent scholar
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more audacious about our attempts to connect with G-d because of the approaching High
Holy Holidays such as Rosh Hashanah (the New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of
Atonement). And yet, Rabbi Kanievsky—one of the main subjects of the story—is not a
Hasidic Rabbi, while Rabbi Goldberger—the storyteller—is. Would this still qualify as
Hasidic storytelling? Rabbi Goldberger was certainly telling a story about a zaddik
(according to the colloquial Orthodox definition, a righteous person), but Rabbi
Kanievsky is not a Hasidic Rebbe, the type of zaddik that Buber refers to in his tales.
What constitutes Hasidic storytelling? Must the subject, the teller, and the listener be
Hasidic in order for the full value of the story to be maximized? For example, does
reading my small child (who cannot fully comprehend the moral of) a story about the
Satmyr Rebbe count as Hasidic storytelling?
My own decision to identify as a Hasidic Jew was part of a slow, ten year process,
which began with my exposure to non-Hasidic orthodox Jewry. Initially what drew me in
was the music and atmosphere of the Sabbath day lunch. The melodies, food, and
atmosphere had me returning every week, along with the inspirational and thought
provoking ideas on the weekly Torah reading. Over time, I became exposed to other
streams of Orthodox Judaism, such as the Chabad movement, which actively seeks to
mekaruv (literally draw close) unaffiliated Jews towards the fulfillment of mitzvos, and
perhaps ultimately, living a religiously observant life. Because I did not grow up in a
religious home, and because Chabad was geared towards interacting with the non-
religious, I was most drawn to their communities. Additionally, because Chabad believes
in reaching out to Jews all over the world, no matter where I went, there was a Chabad
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community to join. During these times, I was exposed to the style of prayer, the services,
the music, storytelling, and Hasidic philosophy of Chabad.
Like most American Jews, if I traced back my lineage far enough, I would
eventually find orthodox family members. Because I knew my family had come from
Europe, I assumed they were Ashkenazi, non-Hasidic Jews (I have never confirmed this).
Because there is a concept in Judaism of honoring the previous generations, I decided to
follow the customs and laws of Ashkenazi Jewry, despite my involvement with Chabad.
The decision to change my religious identity within Orthodox Judaism was in a large part
due to reading a book by Rabbi Nachman of Breslev entitled Likutei Moharan (The
Collected Teachings of our Master). After reading some of the teachings of this Hasidic
Rebbe, I was inspired to grow out my beard, grow peyos (long hair on the side of my
head), wear a streimel67
on the Sabbath after marriage, and switch the rite of prayer to the
Hasidic rite. I suppose my discovery of Hasidism in a book, coupled with memories and
experiences with Hasidim, echoes Buber’s rediscovery of Hasidim in opening Zevaat
Ribesh, to see the inspirational words about the Besht.
My identity as a Hasidic Jew is complicated by my upbringing, which was not at
all Hasidic, and my journey to religious Judaism, which was colored by involvement with
other streams of Judaism as well. If I were to reflect on some of the elements that
comprise my identity as a Hasidic Jew and differentiate my practices from those of more
general Jewish Orthodoxy, I would say that the main things are appearance (beard,
payos) clothing (streimel and bekishe68
on Shabbos), rite of prayer (sefard rite), daily
mikveh attendance, and the learning of Hasidic seforim (books on Hasidic philosophy).
67 A fur-lined hat worn by married men on the Sabbath, holidays, and significant days for rite of passage 68 A long coat, traditionally silk; many today are polyester
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Surprisingly, living in a Hasidic community, and speaking Yiddish are not important
parts of that lifestyle, probably because of my upbringing, which was not Hasidic. Most
importantly, underscoring all these elements is the thread common to all streams of
Orthodox Judaism: observance of the halacha (Jewish law). In summary, my Hasidic
identity is comprised both of Jewish observance (common to Orthodoxy in general) and
extra elements such as dress, philosophy, appearance, etc. Coming to Buber’s anthology,
I felt that his stories were missing these elements of religious observance, especially since
Buber was avowedly a non-Hasidic (although spiritually-oriented) Jew. Buber wrote that
the Hasidic life was a life of “ecstatic Joy” and finding the “messianic future in the
present.” Where was the reference to the practical details of daily life, namely, a system
of laws that regulates every moment of an orthodox (and therefore Hasidic) Jewish life?
How could one skip over these crucial details and arrive at the “core” of Hasidic
philosophy?
Additionally, in my experience with Hasidic communities I found that Hasidic
storytelling was not a static canonized element drawn exclusively from books. In fact, it
was a living, ever growing, changing, organic element of the Hasidic lifestyle. Among
the Chabad Hasidim, I heard many stories from both men and women about the
Lubavitcher Rebbe, about anecdotes they had heard, or personal experiences with the
Rebbe (such as receiving a dollar from the Rebbe69
, or seeing the Rebbe in a dream). In
fact, Chabad has complied hundreds of videos of interviews of people telling stories of
69 It was the custom of the Lubavitcher Rebbe to meet with individuals, address their concerns, and then give them a dollar in fulfillment of the precept to give Tzedakah. Many Hasdim save their “Rebbe Dollar.” My wife has such a dollar, given to her by a spiritual mentor who met the Rebbe, and the dollar sits framed on our shelf.
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their interaction with the Rebbe70
, which often involve miraculous financial, medical, and
life predictions from the Rebbe. Although I never met the Lubavitcher Rebbe, I myself
have several Rebbe stories.
My wife and I went to visit her sister in Crown Heights, the Lubavitch
neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. We entered 770 Ocean Parkway, the world
headquarters of Chabad, and the Rebbe’s home and office. Curious, we walked down a
hall deeper into the building, where an enthusiastic Hasid took us into a small room filled
with a large switchboard. In the days before the internet, this small room was the
command center of broadcasting the Rebbe’s teaching all over the world. Phone lines
went directly from this room to various “Chabad Houses” all over the globe, where the
local shliach (literally “emissary,” but a title that included many functions such as Rabbi,
perhaps mohel, shochet, etc. depending on the needs of the community) could pick up a
phone and hear a weekly address on Hasidic philosophy from the Rebbe himself. I was
awed by the Rebbe’s practicality and drive to use modern technology to disseminate
Chasidus71
. Although I never met the Rebbe, this visit to his office with a behind-the-
scenes tour of his communications arm provided details about his life, and I felt myself
drawn closer to him. As a self-identified Hasidic Jew, whose religious journey was
greatly influenced by Chabad and the Lubavitcher Rebbe, this experience helped me
connect to the Rebbe, serving as an example of the connection that Buber discusses in his
introduction between the Hasid and the zaddik.
70 See for example, “My Encounter with the Rebbe” for some examples of these stories: http://www.chabad.org/multimedia/media_cdo/aid/523698/jewish/My-Encounter.htm 71 Mintz also contrasts the practical nature of Chabad to other streams of Hasidism, by citing their organization of an internal police patrol to cut back on neighborhood crime in Crown Heights.
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Another time, I was waiting in a Chabad shul (synagogue) for the services to start,
when an acquaintance approached me, and for no particular reason, told me this story
about the Rebbe: There was a local politician in New York who met with the Rebbe.
After the meeting, the Rebbe pulled him aside, and the politician prepared to receive
some request relating to the improvement of the Jewish neighborhood. To his surprise,
the Rebbe informed him that in his opinion, Chinese immigrants were culturally more
reserved than Americans, and less likely to approach the politician for the assistance they
needed. He advised the politician to proactively assist the Chinese immigrant community.
The politician was stunned; the Rebbe had nothing to do with Chinese immigrants. This
story was meant to illustrate the humanism of the Rebbe as one who cares for all people,
not just his immediate community; it echoes the theme of “becoming human” that Buber
addresses, along with the theme of supernatural spiritual vision discussed by Nigal in her
writings about the hallmarks of stories about the tsadiq. One could even say that this
paper itself is part of a Rebbe story. I began graduate school in the Fall of 2011, left for
several years, and returned to this project in the fall of 2016, in large part because the
Rebbe advised that one should finish a project that they start.
There have been other times where I experienced a Hasidic story was directed
towards me. For example, I was discussing with a friend who identifies as a Hasid of
Chabad my reluctance to grow out my beard. He told me the story of a Hasid who
complained to his Rebbe about how the Rebbe was overly friendly with a non bearded
Jew. “When that man gets to heaven,” the Rebbe explained, “they will say ‘Jew, where is
your beard?’ But when you get to heaven, they will say, ‘beard, where is your Jew?’” The
story was meant to inculcate an understanding that external identifiers are not a mark of
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spiritual authenticity, but some few weeks later, I made a decision to grow out my beard.
I am not connecting the two with any kind of causality, but I have often wondered if that
Hasidic story led me to contemplate a deeper understanding of the meaning of the beard,
and led to my decision to let my beard grow out (Hasidim do not generally shave their
beards). This experience was an example of a personalized moral illustrated through
storytelling, not only first hand, but in an impromptu, organic way, based on the
discussion of the moment. This organic nature of the Hasidic tale was missing from
Buber’s anthology, although this tension is probably common to all genres of storytelling
as they make their transition to print. However, this individual anecdote illustrates the
theme of the tale being told according to the needs of the moment, which Cooper
discusses in his article, and Buber mentions in his prologue to the Tales.
Another example of Hasidic storytelling occurred as a Chabad Rabbi in the
Baltimore area ended his Shabbosh Drasha (Sabbath Sermon) on the Sabbath which fell
during the eight day festival of Chanukah, when Jews light an eight-branched candelabra
called a Chanukiah. The Rabbi related a story of the Nazi death camps, where the soldier
in charge of one particular bunk would set out a large vat of margarine, which the hungry
Jews would climb into in order to scoop out a little something to put on their crusty
bread. A certain Jew refused to denigrate himself by jumping into the vat, but one day, he
leapt right in, and rolled around in the margarine fully clothed. When the guard left, he
began to rip his greasy clothing into strips; his bunkmates thought he had lost his mind.
He reminded them that night was the festival of Chanukah, when Jews are commanded to
light the Chanukia. He used the greasy strips of cloths as wicks, and lit the menorah. The
story was meant to corroborate the message of the sermon, about shining spiritual light
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into the “dark places” of life. It also—as a Hasidic story—fortified the resolve of the
listeners to fulfill the halachic commandments.
This emphasis on the importance of halacha in Hasidic life is not so prominently
featured in Buber’s storytelling. Furthermore, the above narrative, which occurred during
the holocaust, challenges the canonical “sealed” nature of Buber’s anthology, which
effectively implies that the Hasidic story ends with the sixth generation of Hasidim. In
actuality, this story illustrates the current and living nature of the Hasidic tale. Hasidic
stories are swapped among friends, shared in synagogues, and delivered at the Shabbos
table. Hasidic folklore did not die out within the first few generations; it is alive and well
today, and a prominent part of Hasidic life.
Hasidic storytelling is also alive and growing in digital contexts like the web and
video. Hasidic stories (many by storyteller Yitzchok Buxbaum) are featured on websites
like Chabad.org. There is also a Chabad custom every motzai Shabbos (literally the
exiting of the Sabbath, or Saturday night) to play a video in the shul of the late
Lubavitcher Rebbe delivering a Torah discourse, followed by an interview with someone
who shares a story of their interaction with the Rebbe; this video series is called Living
Torah.72
Hasidic storytelling has expanded beyond Hasidic circles as well, into the
Reform and Conservative movements. Professional storyteller Doug Lipman writes in his
article “Letting the Story Choose Me” (The Hasidic Stories Homepage) about a speaking
engagement on a Friday night in an unnamed synagogue. He intended to tell one
particular story, but found himself transitioning into a different, longer tale. The audience
was polite, but he detected exasperation with the length of his performance. Lipman
could not determine why his performance had gone awry, until later he met with the
72 http://www.chabad.org/therebbe/livingtorah/default_cdo/aid/42106/jewish/Archives.htm
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Rabbi, who informed Doug that the story (which was about the loss of a child) touched a
personal chord, because the Rabbi had lost a child a few years before. “I no longer feel an
obligation only to choose stories well. Now I also feel the obligation to let the right
stories choose me” (Lipman). With this observation, Doug Lipman echoes Levi Cooper’s
conclusion that the Hasidic story is told according to the needs of the moment.
To supplement my research, I decided to interview the Hasidic Rabbi who had
told the story about the Jew in the concentration camp. This Rabbi, I had noticed,
frequently integrates storytelling into his weekly Sabbath sermon. Rabbi Elchonon
Lisbon of Baltimore is a Rabbi in the Chabad Hasidic movement, (founded by Rabbi
Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745 -1812), author of the Hasidic work the Tanya). Rabbi
Lisbon and I sat at his dining room table, and he addressed some of my questions about
Hasidism and the Hasidic tale, which we can compare to Buber’s definitions, and the
discoveries of Mintz and Fader.
In response to the question “what is Hasidism,” Rabbi Lisbon explained that
Hasidism was revealed to our recent generations by the Baal Shem Tov. It is “Penimius
Hatorah,” or the “inner teaching of Torah.” Hasidism is not a revolutionary teaching, but
reveals that which is already inherent in Judaism and Torah. Because of historical
circumstances, the inner dimension had to be revealed in more manifest ways. Hasidism
is “a manifestation of the deeper connection of the Jew to his own soul…his Torah…his
creator” (Lisbon). This function of Hasidism to reveal the “inner dimension” of Torah is
not so clearly explained by Buber, but the mention of connection to a deeper layer of self
echoes what Buber writes about the Rebbe facilitating spiritual wholeness by connecting
heaven and earth, and his Hasidim to G-d. Furthermore, Rabbi Lisbon validates Buber’s
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claim that Hasidism presents nothing revolutionary in terms of material, for such material
was already an inherent part of Judaism.
Rabbi Lisbon explained the nature of the Rebbe, the Hasid, and the relationship
between them. The “Rebbe” is a special soul that comes into the world for the purpose of
living as a role model, mentor, teacher, and guide for other Jewish people, to illustrate
what it means to be a true servant of G-d. He helps those who want to be connected to
him know proper behavior and direction in life. A Rebbe is a Tzadik, because such
leadership requires “a righteous person.” A tzadik is one who has developed (through
lineage and/or education) a selfless nature, synchronized to a higher purpose in life; he is
completely selfless and in-touch with a higher reality, and the tzadik’s life is “a physical
manifestation of higher reality.” A Hasid spends a lifetime trying live a lifestyle based on
the inner teachings of Torah—selflessness, dedication, love, and joy in the service of
Hashem (a word for G-d), which is manifested in the relationship between man and G-d,
and man and fellow man. For the Hasid, G-d is always in front of him (or her). It is
demanding and rigorous, but also inspirational and exciting. Here Rabbi Lisbon validates
Buber’s emphasis on the importance of “becoming human” and the sanctity of
interpersonal relationships.
According to Rabbi Lisbon, although Hasidism follows the same Torah as general
Jewish Orthodoxy, it differs, for the Rebbe inspires his Hasidism with a higher degree of
religious observance, “not just mitzvah, but hidur [beautification of the]
mitzvah…observance of the mitzvah in the most meticulous way” without the need to
rationalize or “work around” observance: Hasidim search for truth rather than
compromise, and “a true Hasidic lifestyle will manifest those ideals.” Jewish Orthodoxy
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requires following the 613 mitzvos [commandments], but Hasidim may be distinguished
by the fact that “the Hasid has G-d, neshama [soul], purpose” much more often as part of
the conversation than a traditional religious Jew, for his purpose is “to find a deeper and
more significant connection to Hashem, Torah and Mitzvos” than otherwise required by
Jewish Orthodoxy. Meaning and significance to the law is given far more attention and
detail in Hasidic thought. Here Rabbi Lisbon validates the arguments of critics that
importance of Halacha was downplayed in Buber’s writing, when in actuality it is central
to the Hasidic lifestyle.
When I asked about elaboration on the relationship between the Rebbe and his
Hasidim, Rabbi Lisbon paused to give this question serious thought. “A Hasid finds his
Rebbe,” he began. A Hassid’s Rebbe is someone who knows the soul of his Hasidim, and
the soul of the Rebbe is a general soul that incorporates the souls of his Hasidim in his
circle and beyond. The Hasid attempts to live a lifestyle through the instructions of his
Rebbe, because his Rebbe is a personification of how the Torah is supposed to be lived.
Here Rabbi Lisbon echoes the writing of Mintz, and even Buber in his introduction, when
he writes of the zaddik as one who attends to the big and little concerns of his Hasidim—
he knows and cares for them on a personal level.
Hasidic storytelling is a powerful tool that allows a Hasid to learn Hasidic
philosophy and see how it was practiced by the previous generation; it takes theory and
makes it real by applying the Hasidus [Hasidic philosophy] to different life situations. We
learn how the Hasidim maintained their Hasidim, and how the Rebbe lived his life. Even
the Torah itself follows this pattern, for before we receive the laws (as we might say,
nomos), we learn about the stories of the patriarchs in the book of Genesis (narrative).
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Serving a great Torah master is of greater benefit than learning from the Torah master,
because one can see how the lifestyle is actually lived. Seeing that reality is a powerful
tool of inspiration, and that is the function of the Hasidic tale: to teach the listener about
how to live the Hasidic life, a life where the Torah is observed along the most meticulous,
beautified lines.
As for the method of categorizing the tales, the stories may come in many forms,
“and each story has its place.” The bottom line is that it is a mitzvah to tell over the story,
for we see what another Hasidic did in that situation, and therefore, Hasidic storytelling is
“as varied as life itself.” As for the kabbalistic power of storytelling to create a change in
reality, Rabbi Lisbon responded that it was possible “only if the person who hears the
story becomes a changed person because of the story. It can fall on deaf ears and not go
anywhere.” In Hebrew, the word for story is sipur, which relates to the word saphir
(gemstones, particularly sapphire). If you take the story to heart and start living it, then
you become a brilliant gem, and that is the purpose of the story fulfilled. There may be
some deeper kabbalistic effect, but that’s not the intent of the story; rather, we must focus
on the message and adopt what the story is telling us. According to Rabbi Lisbon,
everything in Torah has a ripple effect, but the Rebbe does not tell the story for the
purpose of kabbalistic machinations—he tells it for the Hasidim to consciously absorb,
take the message to heart, and live it out.
To illustrate an example of this didactic inspirational nature of the Hasidic tale, I
would actually like to reference another moment in my interactions with Rabbi Lisbon.
During a Sabbath day lunch meal on a separate occasion, he had an unusual bottle
brought over to the table, which he had purchased as a souvenir from a spring in the
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Ukraine, attributed to a miracle of the Baal Shem Tov. Once, when the Baal Shem was
walking in the woods, the time came for the afternoon prayer. The Baal Shem Tov would
always wash his hands before praying, but there was no water to be found. He lay down
on the ground and asked that G-d not make him pray without first washing his hands,
whereupon a spring came up from the ground, and to this day, one can visit the spring
which is attributed to the Baal Shem Tov. Rabbi Lisbon had visited this spring, and said
that while the surrounding landscape was locked in snow and ice, the water of the spring
was unfrozen moving, from which he took the message that despite the spiritual coldness
or stagnancy of one’s surroundings, one can maintain their spiritual life force by
continuing to move. Here, Rabbi Lisbon illustrated that the prime function of the Hasidic
tale was drawing an inspirational message from the story, as he had said in my interview
with him.
Rabbi Lisbon stated that this inspirational function of the tale is especially seen in
the fabrengen, a central part of Chabad Hasidic practice, where Hasidim gather together
to tell over stories that illustrate the beauty of the Torah in real terms. Hasidim are
encouraged to write “their part” in the story and be inspired. However, despite their
important place at the fabrengen, there is not a specific place for the Hasdic story, for it is
best told “wherever it fits”…if the story is part of a Torah message, it takes the message
out of the realm of the scholastic into the actual. Storytelling is not supposed to be
ritualized or formal, because storytelling (and in particular, the practice of fabrengen)
requires the spontaneity of reaching out from the heart to give another Hasid help, “the
deepest measure of love and concern for each other.” I have experienced what Rabbi
Lisbon discusses firsthand, when, in casual conversation with Hasidim, they begin to tell
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stories of Hasidim and/or Rebbes from previous generations that relate to the topic we are
discussing. Here we see that the extemporaneous nature of the fabrengen again highlights
the nature of the Hasidic tale to be told according to the needs of the moment.
I asked Rabbi Lisbon to address the universal applicability of Hasidic storytelling.
“Hasidus [Hasidism] was never meant to be a group within Judaism. It was meant to help
Jews access the deepest part of their neshama (soul), and for everybody to gain
something from that journey.” I asked Rabbi Lisbon if there was possibility for the power
of the Hasidic story to reach beyond Jewish circles, to non-Jews as well. Could the stories
present anything of value and significance for the wider world, which Buber seems to
indicate in his introduction, and by the very act of translating the tales for a wider
readership? “I think so,” Rabbi Lisbon responded, “because we all have a soul, and every
soul has an inner and exterior level. To transition from external life to a spiritual life…is
something that all people can do…to have a deeper connection to something more
inward…more intensely part of an essential self.” I asked Rabbi Lisbon how he had seen
this universal potential in practice, and he replied that in telling Hasidic stories to non-
Jewish groups, he has seen a positive response. The audience has told him the stories are
“eye-opening” and “inspirational.” It gives them a connection to an inner dimension.
Storytelling is integral to Hasidism because it takes the Torah out of the realm of
the instructional into the experiential—but could that full Hasidic experience be
communicated to an audience that did not live the Hasidic lifestyle? I explained to Rabbi
Lisbon that many of his answers about Hasidism, the Rebbe, the Hasid, and Hasidic
storytelling were explicitly mentioned by Buber in his writing (albeit an emphasis on
Halacha was missing). I asked Rabbi Lisbon to address why, as a Hasidic Jew, I felt
136
something missing from Buber’s anthology, especially because of the omission of
reference to Halacha. Rabbi Lisbon responded by saying that as far as Buber’s ability to
carry the Hasidic message through his stories goes, Buber looks at the stories as an
outsider (Buber himself would perhaps not deny this, since he openly stated that he could
not live as a Hasid). I asked if Buber’s claim of ecstatic joy as the central tenet of
Hasdism was “ambiguous, and yet accurate.” Rabbi Lisbon answered (in true Hasidic
storytelling fashion) with a story from the Rebbe Maharash (the fourth Rebbe of Chabad,
Rabbi Shmuel of Lubavitch 1834 – 1882).
An unlearned farmer hired a tutor for his son, and the farmer would also give the
tutor his mail to read out loud. One day, the farmer handed the tutor a particular letter,
which stated that the farmer’s father had passed away. Upon hearing the news, the farmer
fainted. The Rebbe Maharash asks: why, when the farmer hears the news, he faints, but
the tutor who reads the news has no reaction, and even continues to read? The difference
is that the news is about the farmer’s father—it means something to him, but it does not
have personal significance for the tutor. “Buber writes stories, [but] it’s not his father.
They’re stories on paper. The message cannot come across from a pen that looks at it
from the outside as opposed to the inside” (Lisbon).
In conclusion, Rabbi Lisbon confirmed many of Buber’s statements about
Hasidism, the Rebbe, Hasidim, and Hasidic storytelling. He seemed to imply that the full
experience of Hasidic storytelling was best experienced by Hasidim telling, receiving,
and living out the message of the tales, for one of the prime focuses of the tale was to
inspire and instruct Hasidim on how to live the Hasidic lifestyle. And yet, Hasidism did
offer something to the wider world; an opportunity to see the deeper meaning in life, and
137
connect to the deeper parts of one’s self and the Divine. In my reading of Buber, I had
focused on his status as an “outsider,” and it left me with a feeling that the tales were
somehow inauthentic, a charge that was echoed by critics who took issue with his
romanticized depiction, linguistic gentrification, historical inaccuracy, or neglect of
halachic references. What if I could shift my focus from what was “lacking” in Buber’s
anthology, to what it offered—that is, the opportunity to connect with something deeper
in life? Admittedly, Buber downplayed the interplay between Jewish ritual law and
storytelling, and we have seen the importance of that interweaving through the research
of Mintz and Fader, and the writings of Bialik and Covers. And yet, surely the possibility
of ecstatic joy and spiritual wholeness could still be applicable to people who did not
incorporate the Hasidic legend into their own lives through the fulfillment of the Hasidic
lifestyle. A personal storytelling experience with the Hasidic legend leads me to conclude
that Buber’s vision indeed has universal potential.
138
CHAPTER VIII
CONCLUSION
In the spring semester of 2013, I was asked to make a presentation on Hasidic
Legends for a class I was taking as a graduate student73
. There were two stories I
particularly gravitated towards that I had read and decided to share as samples of Hasidic
storytelling (one in a pamphlet about the power of saying Psalms, and another in an
anthology called A Treasury of Chasidic Tales, by Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Zevin, a tale
which was also in Buber’s anthology74
). As the day of the presentation approached, I
grew nervous about my ability to captivate the audience with these Hasidic tales,
depicting a lifestyle that had nothing to do with their own: how would they react to these
stories? Would I be able to convey them in an engaging way?
I decided to amend the morals of these tales to make them more accessible,
changing the word “Jew(s)” to “person” or “people” and making the morals “when a
person experiences remorse in their heart, that repentance is sufficient,” and “these are
the heartfelt prayers of the simple people.” I also changed some of the Hebrew words
into their English equivalents in order to make the language understandable. The first
story went as follows:
“Once a man violated the Sabbath by accident [here I briefly explained the
concept of the Sabbath and how it involves refraining from certain creative or work-
related activities]. He asked his Rabbi for a way to repent, and the rabbi suggested he
light candles every Friday afternoon in synagogue, before the approach of the Sabbath.
73 This was a course taught by Dr. Dorothee Ostmeier on Magic, the Uncanny, and Surrealistic and Fantastic Tales 74 Buber, “Heavy Pennance.” Tales of the Hasidim, pages 142-143.
139
Another man sitting and learning at the back of the synagogue saw this person lighting
candles and scoffed at how easy it was for this sinner to repent. Every week, he would
cause something go awry with the candles—they would go out, or a dog would come
along and eat them.
“One afternoon, this man sitting and learning in the back of the synagogue
received a letter from the Baal Shem Tov himself, an invitation to spend Shabbos [the
Sabbath] together. He set out in a coach to see the Baal Shem Tov, but along the journey,
one bad thing after another kept happening: the wheels broke, the horses died, and the
wagon got stuck in the mud. Even though the man had left on Wednesday, it was late
Friday afternoon before he arrived in the Baal Shem Tov’s city, dangerously close to the
arrival of the Sabbath [here I reiterated that it is forbidden to travel on the Sabbath]. He
burst through the door, only to find the Baal Shem Tov standing by the table holding a
wine goblet, sanctifying the Sabbath. The man fainted and fell to the floor: he had arrived
too late, and violated the Sabbath by traveling.
“When he awoke, the Baal Shem Tov told him that the Sabbath had not really
arrived yet, and that he was just bringing in the Sabbath early by choice. The Baal Shem
Tov explained that he knew this man scoffed at the sinner’s simple act of repentance, and
he had invited him here, orchestrating everything in order to illustrate that when a person
feels remorse in his heart (as the man surely did coming into the Baal Shem Tov’s house,
thinking that he had violated the Sabbath) that is sufficient repentance.”
The second story went as follows:
140
“At the third meal of the Sabbath, the Baal Shem Tov would invite his most elect
disciples to sit around the table as he gave over a deep kabbalistic discourse. One of the
Hasidim asked the Baal Shem Tov why he favored the simple people so much.
“The Baal Shem Tov commanded his Hasidim to close their eyes and hold hands,
forming a ring around the table. Then he launched into the singing of a niggun [wordless
melody] and the Hasidim felt themselves lifted up to supernal heights. They began to
scream out phrases in Yiddish like “please G-d, help us to have children,” or “please G-d,
help me to make the money I need to support my family.” Soon the feeling subsided, and
the Hasidim felt themselves back in this world.
“The Baal Shem Tov explained that his lofty, accomplished Hasidim, well versed
in the study of the Torah and the Kabbalah, were experiencing the prayers of the simple
people down the street, gathered in the synagogue, who were to ignorant to do anything
other than recite the Psalms with no understanding, and cry out to G-d with their whole
heart. These are the prayers of the simple people.”
As I looked around at the students, I was surprised to find that I had their full
attention. They were listening to every word, and engaged in the stories. Later, reflecting
upon the experience, I realized why they were engaged and able to connect to the stories:
I was giving them a moral about the power of true, heartfelt remorse, and the power of
simple people to accomplish great things. This was not a moral locked into the Hasidic
world, dependent on the fulfillment of Jewish Law; it was a moral with universal
potential.
The term “universal” might seem problematic, since it is difficult to say that
anything other than the basic functions of life can apply to every group of people in the
141
world. Indeed, I cannot prove that a moral about the sincerity of heartfelt remorse and the
power of simple people to accomplish great things would resonate with every single
person, but I argue that it is valid to say these morals can be meaningful beyond the
Hasidic world that Buber portrays; therefore, I say that the Hasidic legend indeed has a
potential for universal applicability. Again, I quote Buber himself, who writes in the
foreword to Hasidism that “Hasidic truth [is] vitally important for Jews, Christians, and
others…for now is the hour, when we are in danger of forgetting for what purpose we are
on earth” (foreword). Additionally, we might question the applicability of Buber’s work
today based on the timing of his remarks. At the outset of his work with Hasidism, his
existential search for meaning was conducted against the confusion and fragmentation of
multiple currents of thought75
that vied for the loyalty of humankind as the world
emerged into the twentieth century; at the conclusion of his work, the world had just
experienced two World Wars, a Holocaust, and total destruction; therefore, the urgency
of the hour as it relates to the quest for meaning is well understood in his foreword.
Whether or not we live in such tumultuous times today, I am not qualified to answer.
However, humankind has always searched for deeper meaning in life, regardless of the
time period and place, whether it is in eighteenth-century Poland, or the twenty-first
century United States. Cooper has helped us see that the Hasidic tale has a malleability
whereby it can be applied in many different situations. Therefore, I argue that the
universal potential of the Hasidic tale which Buber presents is applicable even for today.
Granted, unlike Buber, in my presentation of the stories I explained the halachic
concepts in some detail (for example, the Sabbath), for otherwise I felt that the listeners
would not understand the story. And yet, in other ways, I emulated Buber’s process of
75 For example, as it relates to Jews in Europe: Zionism, Orthodoxy, the Haskalah, just to name a few.
142
translation. I transposed words out of Hebrew and into English, in order to make them
less foreign-sounding to my audience; I removed the word “Jew” and replaced it with the
more general “person” and “people.” Did my stories remain authentic? I believe they did.
Would my renditions be labeled as “romanticized” or “inaccurate”? Perhaps they would
be, but my reflection on the storytelling experience helped me understand Buber’s work
and his goals. Buber did not craft an anthology of Hasidic Legends for Hasidic Jews. As a
practicing Hasidic Jew reading his anthology, I demanded a halachic “authenticity”
which was not germane to his text. I still believe that in order to be “Hasidic” one needs
to follow Jewish Law (for example, observing the Sabbath and laws of kashrus), and
Buber seems to confirm this himself by writing that despite his immersion in Hasidic
texts, he chooses not to adopt the lifestyle. However, I do not believe that the message of
“ecstatic joy” and “spiritual wholeness” achieved in the path to “becoming [more]
human” should be confined to Hasidism only. What Buber presents is the possibility of
achieving these goals through reading about the lives of the Hasidic masters, the
zaddikim. Tales of the Hasidim is Buber’s instruction manual for this process. It is his
universal vision, accessible to all people, who can achieve a life of ecstatic joy and
spiritual wholeness that is shown to us by the Hasidic masters.
143
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